This is a humanities problem, sure those of us on HN are comfortable in a cashless society. That doesn’t translate to older generations of people. Cash is a fundamental part of a developed society, we should have privacy, fungibility, and large scale acceptance.
I hate that food shops like sweetgreen are cashless, just because the they can’t trust their tellers is not a reason to outright refuse the ability to purchase.
The cashlessness in Sweden has strange effects on people. I don't think I recognize the coins in my country any more. They feel as foreign as coins do when travelling abroad before you get used.
A bigger problem may even be the dependence on US companies for payments. This was mentioned by the head of Riksbanken in an interview the past week. He mentioned Mastercard and Visa, and the Swedish payment system Swish. He did not mention that Swish requires IOS or Android.
We have already gone through this cycle in India. People feel very strange dealing with cash after using UPI for many years. In-fact, many will outright refuse.
Good thing is we do not depend on the US of A - The Unified Payments Interface is an Indian instant payment system and protocol completely independent of US behemoths. There are special, simplified UPI apps developed for senior citizens and lots of training material to ensure differently abled folk are are able to use it.
In the few years, UPI will also be linked with other BRICS national payment systems such as MirPay (Russia), UnionPay (China) and Pix (Brazil). A lot of other nations have expressed interest in joining. Once that is through, we will have an international peer-to-peer, payment networks completely separated from the West and not subject to big-nanny Western interference. Yay! The US can go cry in a corner when its bullying sanctions are just ignored.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadI hate that food shops like sweetgreen are cashless, just because the they can’t trust their tellers is not a reason to outright refuse the ability to purchase.
A bigger problem may even be the dependence on US companies for payments. This was mentioned by the head of Riksbanken in an interview the past week. He mentioned Mastercard and Visa, and the Swedish payment system Swish. He did not mention that Swish requires IOS or Android.
Good thing is we do not depend on the US of A - The Unified Payments Interface is an Indian instant payment system and protocol completely independent of US behemoths. There are special, simplified UPI apps developed for senior citizens and lots of training material to ensure differently abled folk are are able to use it.
In the few years, UPI will also be linked with other BRICS national payment systems such as MirPay (Russia), UnionPay (China) and Pix (Brazil). A lot of other nations have expressed interest in joining. Once that is through, we will have an international peer-to-peer, payment networks completely separated from the West and not subject to big-nanny Western interference. Yay! The US can go cry in a corner when its bullying sanctions are just ignored.