I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer.
I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).
When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.
Reminds me of an old scifi story. Someone in a far future or advanced alien society runs across a paper book. "A means of conveying information without needing power and without the risk of surveillance? Excellent!" (paraphrased from memory).
I've noticed this with mature technology. There comes a point where a product is perfect, no need to add anymore features. But the manufacturer still wants to continue adding new features so that they can use those as new selling points. Unfortunately the new features end up making the product worse.
Replacing the 3.5mm headphone jack with USB-C or Bluetooth, even when some devices seemingly have space to accommodate them easily. I hate progress for progress sakes.
And audio quality on most Bluetooth headphone/earphones sucks. And now I have to carry a zillion dongles for everything.
You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.
That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals.
In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet.
You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet.
It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.
Those system don't have to follow the same regulations as banks and thus have many more ways to extra money that might not be as obvious. Money when converted to tokens and credit are not money in the eye of the law, even if it is used identically to money and is the only currency allowed.
If you are lucky they will return any unused credit automatic to your credit card without any fees. I would like to know how common that is and what kind of terms and conditions most such system has. My cynicism tells me its about as abusive as they can get away with but to be fair I have not tested it (since I either refuse to prepay on principle or only get the exact amount I have decided to already spend).
In Estonia we had something similar but instead of letting us top up via app or card remotely, you had to stand in line at a booth and give them the money and then register your bracelet online to get the refund of any additional funds left on at the end of the process. I get what they were going for but it felt like a ton of friction to me, all to eliminate a single swipe at the payment terminal?
They wanted to also do that for M'era Luna in 2016 and I wasn't very much looking forward to that, hearing it in 2015 - might be because I read about them tracking your movement and having your payment history at the festival. Suddenly cash was really convenient again to me.
Yeah I agree. Was at sziget this summer and we could pay using our bank cards NFC and you don't have to input pin for payments under 15€. Also we could pay with festival's bracelet. This is THE BEST expirience. Easy for staff and for customers
Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not.
The only requirements are that you
1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and
2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone.
If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
In other words, it became the civic responsibility of all the Swedes at the festival to ensure that foreigners-- who had no access to goods/services-- were properly fed, hydrated, and housed.
Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden.
Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.
Nice to have a tendency to escalate. Certain things have a tendency to creep along the nice-to-have-|-must-have continuum. IMO, digital money generally does.
Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning democracies and dictatorships.
Its not just the government that has this data, but every intermediary in the non-cash payment chain. Mastercard for example sells its payment data to Google, who uses it to correlate online ad viewing with in store purchases. There is no way to opt out of this if you use Mastercard, and other intermediaries do similar shady things with your data.
Just today I went to a concert in Malmø where the bar is cash only. This is a medium sized place.
You can withdraw cash by credit card at the ticket desk, to take to the bar and pay for drinks. It's annoying for people like me, occasional visitors from Denmark.
I don't know why they don't have the chip and pin terminal at the bar.
Not being snarky, but there are homeless people in Sweden? In the US we're regaled with tales of the Scandanavian social safety nets. We're told everyone is taken care of. That's not the case?
This has been my experience going on holiday in the Netherlands. Everything functions on cards and touch payments.
I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion.
The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.
Australian who travelled through Sweden and Norway in September of this year for two weeks.
I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.
There will always be other solutions at hand, these guys are doing something about it: https://www.revolut.com
Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID.
I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility.
Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.
The locked down nature of Swish and it’s monopoly status is worrisome. I was thinking there was just a ton of NFC readable payment devices that could accept any form of contactless payment like Apple Pay or Alipay or Google Pay etc... this is definitely not a good sign.
Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed.
There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase.
Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers.
It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there.
The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.
It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes.
All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country.
I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something).
If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.
We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well.
Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.
IOUs from friends: the most resilient form of peer to peer money. There shouldn't be a rush to pay them back either unless they are hard up (or you preferred not to keep track of IOUs)
I'm curious, would your colleagues consider using bitcoin or ethereum as a method of exchange? Could you send them that to pay them back and they could pay on your behalf? If not, why?
edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea.
If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
To the downvoters: care to say why? I read the entire article, read the comment I'm referring to, and have personal experience that the solution I'm proposing works as I'm describing. I'm left with only that everyone must think my question reeks of crypto currency evangelism, and that's a BAD thing here on HN. Is it something else? My grammar or phrasing?
Every time people talk about a cashless society, I tell them about stuff like this both abstractly and concretely, and then I just get called a luddite. I think, unfortunately, that people will have to learn this lesson the hard way. I don't own a working smartphone, my last one (like the one before it) failed randomly in the display, and was unjustifiably difficult to RMA (no box provided, no postage, unclear details on how to mark). I don't get why people want to use these cumbersome, life-running pocket computers to control access to their money on a day-to-day basis. Here in
Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen).
I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?
> I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article?
If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.
What you describe as "just fine" sounds a lot like the US, except that most transactions have enormous fees tacked on by credit card companies. Maybe in Canada you have negotiated better deals.
Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
Anglophones, please, please, excuse me for replying in my native tounge. The cashless society engages my aversion such that it is hard to say in my second language.
Så jävla enig alltså!
Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad.
Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter.
... huh? Or I guess this is sarcasm? This response hardly seems warranted, given it’s just a festival exclusively accepting swish. I never use swish except for sending money to friends, so I don’t think it’s widespread for businesses. Contact less credit card is easier than everything, including cash.
Ok... so you went to a festival without money? How would you have solved this without Swish? As you said there was no ATMs. Card readers are expensive and not really viable for most booths. They are also kind of a monopoly.
You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too.
For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.
A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
Want to share about my experience about the "permission" part.
I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.
I was at a gas station in Grand Forks, ND in the middle of winter at 2AM fueling up. I had traveled this route and stopped at this gas station at about the same time of night multiple times when I was going from ND to MN and back. The card (Citibank Visa) had a large open credit line, but it somehow got rejected because (and I quote) "they installed new software"[1]. This was a bit before I had a cellphone and luckily I had taken my Dad's advice and always kept cash hidden in the car. They promised it wouldn't happen again, and I remembered to make sure I had an emergency stash of cash in the car. I have no clue what I would have done if I had to only use that card.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
Yep, I've had that happen to me every time I travelled back to Berlin when I was living in London. Every single time my Barclay's card would refuse to work.
So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.
And you might be leery of criticizing any of these entities lest they withdraw your ability to do any of these things. That's a serious chilling effect.
Its a fear that shows up in a common interpretation of Revelation 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. This is one of the verses in the Bible that tends to drive a lot of the hatred for national ids and removal of cash in the US.
«that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time»
Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.
The article says clearly that they are trying to figure out a stored value card. If they do, the only chilling part is if the means of exchanging it was somehow unobtainable.
It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.
A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.
>> main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc.
Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution, yet had some recourse for fraudulent transactions, didn't require downloading hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain, processed more than a handful of transactions globally per ten minutes, and where you didn't lose all your money if you accidentally deleted the wrong file or your hard drive broke or got lost.
That's presumably not what a central bank concerned about access to central bank cash has in mind. I had to chuckle about this part of the article:
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, a society that relies on digital payments is a society that would collapse with a week long blackout. A couple targeted power plant attacks would be enough to completely destroy the economy. That's terrifying.
We have known how to do untraceable* transactions [0] since 1982. There has now been thirty years of cryptographic research building on these results. The reason it hasn't happened is not because we can't do it but because governments resist the additional privacy protections.
* - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides in practice, but certainly a massive privacy improvement over credit cards.
In theory cash provides less privacy than ecash since stores could record the serial numbers on cash. However in practice they don't and thus cash in practice provides quite a bit of privacy.
I am native or Sweden and I hate, from the bottom of my heart, having to use my bank card for visits to restaurants, stores, etc. It is better when staying staying away from Stockholm, Göteborg, & Malmö.
That's how services work though, you can't really be self sufficient unless you're a hunter gatherer. And even then you still need to be strong enough to kill the other tribes who are contesting with you for land. Imagine going to Mars and the very air you breathe is owned by your government. For me that's not an argument against going to mars, that's an argument for working harder to build a stronger, more trustworthy society.
This is a false comparison. Physical cash, in your possession, cannot be frozen or revoked unless those entities stop accepting government fiat currency. It has nothing to do with being self-sufficient.
Except that eventually a growing number of participants will start to barter where they can, and then someone will come up with the idea of a issuing some liquid token to facilitate things when bartering is not possible.
Whar happens in case of war, when data centers are destroyed or just access to internet is limited?
Can you imagine massive desire to switch back to cash/gold/stones?
You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level.
That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
> That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
Not to be pedantic but a person can in return also revoke their obligation to abide by these rules (like paying for food at the cashier or board a train without a ticket) at any time. So essentially there always exists a choice to not play by the rules if the regulators of this cashless society decide to cut you out
No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless?
I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.
Good point. There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later. So better to increase the insurance fee.
For sure such information trading is illegal, but as the government doesn't give a single care, most likely it is true.
>There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later.
Or worse, what if they decide you had too much pub spending/fast food, so you can't get that new organ you need?
I keep my "entertainment" budget (pubs, eating out, etc) in cash for this reason.
This doesn't make much sense - insurance is about sharing risk amoung common entities, so increasing the premiums based on risk on micro-factors isn't really that helpful. You would probably get good enough performance from a couple of basic, easily obtained variables (age, weight, family history), instead of tracking, organizing and figuring out all of these variables.
This is huge systemic risk (the possibility that an event at the company level could trigger severe instability or collapse an entire industry or economy).
When the systems in major Nordic bank (Nordea, Danske Bank) or payment system (Visa, MasterCard) goes down, people can't do anything until it's fixed. These things are rare but they happen. Usually it's just few hours, but if the condition persists even few days it becomes a major problem.
Mobile payment and cards are nice, but cash is good backup system.
Such as when the Irish banks went on strike for about 6 months in the 70s. Edit: It was a lockout not a strike.
They survived using olde worlde approaches with no loss of GDP growth or retail sales. The retailers and local pubs operated as banks and managed the movement of IOU credits and cheques. Publicans, as it turned out, were a pretty good gauge of credit-worthiness and extent. Cheques ended up counter signed dozens of times as they were passed on person to person many times. Retailers would offer cheque cashing to keep money circulating.
> Swedish legislation makes it possible for retailers, restaurants and other companies to refuse to accept cash, for instance by putting up a sign at the entrance or by the till.
Yes. It started as a curiosity and now this signs are everywhere.
> By connecting a bank account in any bank with a mobile phone number, Swish has become a popular way to share a restaurant bill
Yes. And to gather money for a friend's birthday or anything else.
> Why Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
I see the potential risks of this situation. But the article does not bother to bring an analysis of them.
One thing is already happening. The oldest part of the population have a hard time adapting to this situation. It's easier to take a bus and pay in cash than to have to buy an e-ticket in your phone.
I would prefer to see such analysis than this e-krona nonsense.
I suppose the oldest part can get a card like SL has and occasionally load it with cash and then just beep it when entering the bus/train? It is no more difficult a concept than having a library card. They'll certainly get help with the process at the ticket counter.
Is it a real, factual problem that old people cannot somehow pay for their mass transit in the year 2018?
I was really shocked when i experienced the same issue in the Netherlands.
I went there for a conference and only had to go straight to Amsterdam central, to science park and to my hotel in almere central.
I had to exit Amsterdam central station by scanning in the QR code of my paper ticket. The alarm at that station was ringing constantly because of all the foreign tourists who had no idea what to do.
Outside I had to go to the foreign help desk which was nice enough to give me some kind of tourist paper ticket, which i do have to say, i have no idea how it worked. Hopefully it was a rfid chip in the ticket, otherwise i triggered every last scanner by just pushing it on top and walked out. And every last person was heavily annoyed by all the retarded tourists. It did not help, that apparently the Netherlands do not bother to put up English signs.
I luckily could pay in cash for the toilet in central station, but that was really it when it comes to cash. I luckily could use my VISA for a train station locker, but i could not buy a bottle of water, as the machine at main station only took some kind of wireless card. The same applied to every supermarket but one near my hotel.
I stood in 3 ordinary supermarkets and wanted to buy a simple bottle of water. Thankfully one of the cashiers in the supermarket at science park was nice enough to pay for a bottle of water for me in exchange for cash.
How every nice the Netherlands are, it is a modern Dystopia.
The Netherlands, just as most other countries within the EU do not rely much on the AmEx/Visa/Mastercard payment network, but on V-Pay (VISA) or Maestro (Mastercard).
Those are direct debit transactions which cannot be reversed unlike CC transactions. The advantage for shops is, that the costs are lower than for CCs. In general, Europe isn't used to paying ordinary everyday items with a credit card, which is why grocery shops simply don't accept them.
Landing in the US for a very short trip I didn’t want to draw cash out (and have to store the notes for the next trip or change them back to local currency), and so I couldn’t tip people that needed to be tipped. Then I tried drawing cash from an ATM and couldn’t anyway.
I mean, everyone has a story about how they were disadvantaged by a particular system.
I gave them my Visa and V-Pay card, and only one of the patrol stations took it.
Everyone else willing to take my non Netherland card were places who would also take cash, like mcdonalds.
There seemed to have been a certain kind of regional card which i did not have.
edit: dont take me wrong, i should have looked up the local payment procedure before going there, I was just extremely surprised as this happened to me directly across the border inside the EU.
The article says circulating cash is 1% of GDP and falling. In the US, it is 8% and rising (with a high of 12% in 1946 and a low of 4% in the early 1980s)
I can’t find the article, but didn’t another Nordic country, where they’re going cashless already find a flaw? Their communication infrastructure had some sort of disruption, I don’t think it was an attack, but a failure of something for like half a day. Because of that, merchant services were screwed. Few people could buy anything since few carried cash.
Don’t get me wrong, I barely carry cash on me. I just have a bit in a safe. But I recognize the vulnerability. Natural disaster. Black out due to a node failure or two. An actual attack on the merchant services infrastructure or bank. Sure, cash can be stolen. But so can digital funds and you’re not limited to how much you can fit in a bag and carry.
It’s also funny how folks complain about privacy and not wanting private entities to have their nose in their personal lives and track what they do. Especially those Vikings whine about that regularly. Yet they trust how much data with merchant service companies?
There is a practical benefit of locality in traditional distributed systems that may get lost with companies centralizing their operations for economies of scale.
If your bank is local, as is your merchant's, you could design the payment network in such a way that, if your region is cut off from the rest of the Internet, local communication can still allow payment authorizations to go through.
Readit News
I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).
When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.
Utopia my ass.
Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.
And audio quality on most Bluetooth headphone/earphones sucks. And now I have to carry a zillion dongles for everything.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
plus cash it's also accepted everywhere
In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet.
You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet.
It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
If you are lucky they will return any unused credit automatic to your credit card without any fees. I would like to know how common that is and what kind of terms and conditions most such system has. My cynicism tells me its about as abusive as they can get away with but to be fair I have not tested it (since I either refuse to prepay on principle or only get the exact amount I have decided to already spend).
Disney does that at Disneyland and Disney World in America: https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/plan/my-disney-experience/...
You can also use it to unlock you hotel room and to link to those photographs that are taken of you when you're on the rides.
Makes the lines for drinks move so fast, it’s really outstanding.
Dead Comment
I have a Swedish bank account, but I still can't use Swish because I have an American phone. It's infuriating.
The only requirements are that you
1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and
2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone.
If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden.
Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.
You can withdraw cash by credit card at the ticket desk, to take to the bar and pay for drinks. It's annoying for people like me, occasional visitors from Denmark.
I don't know why they don't have the chip and pin terminal at the bar.
Deleted Comment
I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
Speaking as a Swedish native who lived in japan for years
It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion.
The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.
I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.
Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID.
I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility.
Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.
Deleted Comment
Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed.
There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase.
Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers.
It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there.
The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.
It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes.
All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country.
I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something).
If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.
Deleted Comment
I'm a Norwegian in Australia.
We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well.
Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.
edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea.
If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen).
I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?
Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article?
If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.
Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
Så jävla enig alltså!
Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad.
Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter.
Ser fram mot min årliga skridskosemester i Norge.
You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too.
For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.
I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.
Cash.
It works.
Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.
The idea is that no central authority can censor your right to spend money.
It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.
A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.
Edit spelling
Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
I agree.
Cash or no cash.
One of the proposed goals is to have non-traceable transactions. Seems unrealistic to me but that would be the holy grail.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
* - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides in practice, but certainly a massive privacy improvement over credit cards. In theory cash provides less privacy than ecash since stores could record the serial numbers on cash. However in practice they don't and thus cash in practice provides quite a bit of privacy.
I am native or Sweden and I hate, from the bottom of my heart, having to use my bank card for visits to restaurants, stores, etc. It is better when staying staying away from Stockholm, Göteborg, & Malmö.
Regimes that absolutist and authoritarian usually aren't the nicest of places to live.
Don't worry, it'll be owned by Elon Musk.
That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
You're welcome.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.
For sure such information trading is illegal, but as the government doesn't give a single care, most likely it is true.
Or worse, what if they decide you had too much pub spending/fast food, so you can't get that new organ you need?
I keep my "entertainment" budget (pubs, eating out, etc) in cash for this reason.
Deleted Comment
When the systems in major Nordic bank (Nordea, Danske Bank) or payment system (Visa, MasterCard) goes down, people can't do anything until it's fixed. These things are rare but they happen. Usually it's just few hours, but if the condition persists even few days it becomes a major problem.
Mobile payment and cards are nice, but cash is good backup system.
How much cash does a person keep handy? If the condition persists a few days, cash would also become a major problem.
They survived using olde worlde approaches with no loss of GDP growth or retail sales. The retailers and local pubs operated as banks and managed the movement of IOU credits and cheques. Publicans, as it turned out, were a pretty good gauge of credit-worthiness and extent. Cheques ended up counter signed dozens of times as they were passed on person to person many times. Retailers would offer cheque cashing to keep money circulating.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/pubs-replaced-banks-in-ireland...
Now try that with an app. :)
Yes. It started as a curiosity and now this signs are everywhere.
> By connecting a bank account in any bank with a mobile phone number, Swish has become a popular way to share a restaurant bill
Yes. And to gather money for a friend's birthday or anything else.
> Why Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
I see the potential risks of this situation. But the article does not bother to bring an analysis of them.
One thing is already happening. The oldest part of the population have a hard time adapting to this situation. It's easier to take a bus and pay in cash than to have to buy an e-ticket in your phone.
I would prefer to see such analysis than this e-krona nonsense.
Is it a real, factual problem that old people cannot somehow pay for their mass transit in the year 2018?
Dead Comment
I went there for a conference and only had to go straight to Amsterdam central, to science park and to my hotel in almere central.
I had to exit Amsterdam central station by scanning in the QR code of my paper ticket. The alarm at that station was ringing constantly because of all the foreign tourists who had no idea what to do.
Outside I had to go to the foreign help desk which was nice enough to give me some kind of tourist paper ticket, which i do have to say, i have no idea how it worked. Hopefully it was a rfid chip in the ticket, otherwise i triggered every last scanner by just pushing it on top and walked out. And every last person was heavily annoyed by all the retarded tourists. It did not help, that apparently the Netherlands do not bother to put up English signs.
I luckily could pay in cash for the toilet in central station, but that was really it when it comes to cash. I luckily could use my VISA for a train station locker, but i could not buy a bottle of water, as the machine at main station only took some kind of wireless card. The same applied to every supermarket but one near my hotel.
I stood in 3 ordinary supermarkets and wanted to buy a simple bottle of water. Thankfully one of the cashiers in the supermarket at science park was nice enough to pay for a bottle of water for me in exchange for cash.
How every nice the Netherlands are, it is a modern Dystopia.
Those are direct debit transactions which cannot be reversed unlike CC transactions. The advantage for shops is, that the costs are lower than for CCs. In general, Europe isn't used to paying ordinary everyday items with a credit card, which is why grocery shops simply don't accept them.
I mean, everyone has a story about how they were disadvantaged by a particular system.
What a shit show
I've been able to pay everywhere I've been to in the Netherlands with a normal European debit card with chip + pin (Maestro I think)
Everyone else willing to take my non Netherland card were places who would also take cash, like mcdonalds.
There seemed to have been a certain kind of regional card which i did not have.
edit: dont take me wrong, i should have looked up the local payment procedure before going there, I was just extremely surprised as this happened to me directly across the border inside the EU.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lZye
Edit: See also this table
https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1803/images/tab6-A.jpg
(from https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1803g.htm )
Don’t get me wrong, I barely carry cash on me. I just have a bit in a safe. But I recognize the vulnerability. Natural disaster. Black out due to a node failure or two. An actual attack on the merchant services infrastructure or bank. Sure, cash can be stolen. But so can digital funds and you’re not limited to how much you can fit in a bag and carry.
It’s also funny how folks complain about privacy and not wanting private entities to have their nose in their personal lives and track what they do. Especially those Vikings whine about that regularly. Yet they trust how much data with merchant service companies?
It's no different than a VISA or MasterCard debit though.
It's a good case for e-krona which I'm looking forward too.
If your bank is local, as is your merchant's, you could design the payment network in such a way that, if your region is cut off from the rest of the Internet, local communication can still allow payment authorizations to go through.
When you need to buy a train ticket to get away from the Germans or Russians you don't want to be asking "Sorry do you accept AmEx?".