Sweden Tries to Halt Its March to Total Cashlessness

Without looking it up: I'm fairly certain the 1 kr coin is copper and looks sort-of like the half-krona coin used to. There's a new 2 kr coin, and they redesigned the 5 kr coin. At least one of them is, like, brass-looking, I think.

The twenty-kronor note is (I think) blue:ish and has Astrid Lindgren on it. I know Ingmar Bergman's on one one of the other notes, either the 100 kr one or the 200 kr one. I think the 200 kr one is, like, greenish. But I couldn't be sure. I don't know any of the other people on the notes, and am at best vague on what colors they are.

If you gave me a reasonably convincing fake 50 kr bank-note but with the wrong person on it, I would have no way of knowing.

Most of the friction I run into is related to the banks themselves - sometimes it's quite impossible to do business with them unless you have a Swedish bank card (or personal number). Examples of things I currently can't do without the above:

1. Refill my train/bus card online or buy train/bus tickets online

2. Use Swish, the Swedish half-answer between cash and cards. This is the bank-to-bank transfer protocol which is only supported by Swedish banks. It is quite convenient if you have it, you can enter in a 10-digit number which many storefronts display next to the register and it otherwise works very much like Apple Pay Cash (which is not supported here yet unfortunately)

3. Have a phone plan. I have to use prepaid and cannot top-up online. I have to always go buy top-up receipts from Pressbyrån

4. Buy from several various mom-and-pop shops that also only for some reason have card machines that support Swedish cards. They also always have a Swish number as mentioned above.

#2 and #4 are usually the most problematic. When I go out with people from Sweden and someone covers something I inevitably end up withdrawing cash as the path of least resistance.

#1 and #3 are related to a popular payment processor in Nordic countries known as DIBS, who currently likes to reject foreign cards but I suspect will eventually support them. I'm hoping Sweden's banks and other payment systems finish integrating with the rest of the world before eliminating cash entirely so as to not alienate outsiders.

The majors of the cities were given some satellite phones by FEMA. No traffic lights around the island ( still today some not working), the roads where blocked by electric pole on the floor. The store looting happen the first ~2 weeks. The complete island goes in ONLY CASH MODE, for around ~3 months.

But yeah, What possibly could go wrong?

I hate to use cash, I like my credit card rewards, but after María, that idea 100% cashless, u got to think about it twice.

I'm curious if Swedish banks passed on that kr100 million savings to their account holders when they stopped taking cash in the first place.

Reminds me of when ATMs first became widespread in the U.S. in the late 70's. The banks kept saying they were the wave of the future, and would save people tons of money because tellers wouldn't be needed anymore.

And yet bank fees went up anyway. So much for saving people money!

More importantly, it can't be overstated that in a world where tracking of human activities has become perhaps the greatest threat to freedom (for example, in China) and to democracy (for example, in advanced democratic countries), cash provides an amazing, simple solution to tracking of your economic activities, at least the in-person transactions. For a trivial amount of effort, you eliminate a major source of information about yourself. It's much easier than using Tor or setting up a VPN, and it's more effective.

tangentially; People are struggling to develop an electronic currency that provides reliable, anonymous, universally accepted transactions using all the tools of a computer. Imagine if the new requirement was, 'now do it using a piece of paper'. Cash is an amazing technology, even if we're all very accustomed to it.

I really hate the new standard of cashless. It's so stupid and a lot of people are defending it without realizing potential consequences this can have.

If a store doesn't provide an ability to pay with cash, then I am most likely not going to purchase anything from that store.

Anyways, I think the idea of cashlessness is not only scary but very impractical. What about, for instance, farmer's markets, yard sales, buying something like a newspaper or pack of gum, etc? Do people really use cards for purchases of a few cents, and do farmers and (let's just say) lemonade stands actually take charge cards? Stupid. And, needless to say to a bunch of hackers, Orwellian as fk.

I recently got rid of the need to have a wallet. Just carry a few cards in a wallet phone case and use Apple Pay about 50% of the time.

When cash ran out they survived by using undated cheques (often re-signed multiple times as they were passed around like notes), and when cheques ran out IOUs and local trust.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-can-all-get-...

https://archive.li/20171221075726/https://www.ft.com/content...

We've even started paying street sellers and beggars electronically now. Because even they realize that almost nobody is carrying cash anymore.

Being a "prepper" has gone from being seen as border-line psychotic behavior to "being a responsibile citizen". As long as you don't go over-board and try to prep for more than 4-7 days lack of electricity/water/food - then you're still seen as suspicious. Small steps.

There was also this campaign just a week or two ago - every household received a leaflet telling them to prepare for any incidents that stop public services:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/sweden-distrib...

This stuff used to be standard operating procedure when I grew up in the 70s/80s - all this stuff was printed in the annual phone directories that everyone receieved. After Soviet collapsed we stopped doing it though.

There's also been an unusually large number of outages of networked systems in Sweden the past two years, all over the place. Things like ATC systems, banks, media/cable tv distribution systems. Perhaps the official, public explanations are true (typically some kind of "human error" or "software update problem"). I suspect there's an adversary who is not very shy.