Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
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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.
edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
In my EU country, there are already six banks that let you do this, and I doubt we're pioneers.
In the example provided I’m sending my pal BTC for some shared purchase because there’s no cash.
My friend didn’t have a BTC address / wallet or whatever, now they do, and I’ve just transferred them 0.0028 BTC to cover my share of lunch.
Now what?
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.
Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no.
It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration.
It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.
Crypto's could do this. They just aren't set up as easy right now. I'm pointing at bitcoin etc. They are also slow. I can tap my MasterCard contactless card/phone and pay for coffee and the merchant is happy. I've had bitcoin take >30 minutes to transfer. Unacceptably slow.
I've never been asked for an address when doing a wire transfer.
From what I've heard banks stopped validating the name field a long time ago and you can enter whatever you want.
I don't think they validate it, though, IIRC I've gotten away with simply putting in "Germany".
I don't remember seeing issues in SEPA area, if I just use the IBAN and pay like any normal payment. If I am specifically doing a "foreign payment" some extra fields need to be filled in. That is how I recall the process, last time was 1 year ago though.
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 real problem comes when the system breaks down- which I've seen happen at plenty of festivals. At that point if cash isn't an option then commerce simply stops- screwing both vendor and customer alike.
for a $5 processing fee
Except when they have no change (forcing you to find someone willing to change it or wait for them to do so) or refuse to accept a large bill. I often choose to use cash, but it's really not frictionless.
Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke.
With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the purchasing event so that you lose track of it, like how microtransactions are never priced in actual currency.
If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money.
I’ve been to a festival which allowed us to withdraw money freely (I think they had some restrictions such as only 1 free withdrawal after the festival was over, and/or it had to be done within a week or so) but that allowed us to simply load in excess money so we never had to recharge. That worked really well for us.
The ability for poor implementations to exist is itself a strike against the general concept.
Have to load money, have to retrieve money, and have zero insight into how much I’ve already spent without even more apps or interfaces.
Even if some transactions have extra friction such as ID checks for age-restricted purchases, the less intrusive solution is color coded "dumb paper" wristbands.
Handling cash is a hassle in many ways:
1. It's slow. Obviously it is not slow in the best case when the customer throws in the exact change, but it is _really_ slow in the probably more typical case when the drunkard is at the counter and starts to dig into the pockets and find out if he has enough coins or when the seventh customer in the row wants to pay his ten cent lollipop with a hundred dollar bill and you run out of change.
2. It ties capital to keep sufficient amount of change in all of the booths.
3. It is difficult/expensive to manage securely and safely. You need to figure out how to stop personnel and other people stealing the money. Also your personnel likely feels more safe when they know that nobody can think that hey can come and try to steal money from you because you simply have none.
Or if I'm feeling extra tech-y, I can do that with my watch or phone.
2. A negligible amount for a vendor on a festival.
3. Not a problem on a festival. Booths tend to be manned by two persons because of other safety factors anyway, so staff stealing isn't an issue, and any organised criminality on a festival is usually limited to (relatively) low risk, high reward crime: pick-pocketing (smartphones in particular).
And especially the ‘takes longer’ argument just shifts the time people are waiting to the charging station, or to their own homes, if they’re charging beforehand.
I think it’s fairly easy to make any change handling easy by making everything cost multiples of $1
have zero insight into how much I’ve already spent
If every single actual implementation of an idea is bad then maybe the idea wasn’t such a great one either.
Contactless payments with a regular credit card are as far as this idea needed to go, everything else is either a gimmick or a rip-off attempt.
Music venues have some interesting procedures, Alpine valley allows under an oz of weed to be brought in. They have college girls carrying backpacks with 40k in cash. There is an off duty cop directly behind though.
Why do they allow weed to be brought in? Why do they have college girls carrying cash in a backpack? Why so much cash? Why is there an off-duty cop following her around? Isn't an off-duty cop just an ordinary member of the public? If a cop is required shouldn't it be an on-duty cop? If it's somehow a trap to catch drug dealers, how is it meant to work? Why do they limit the amount of weed? And why are they trying to catch drug dealers at all?
I'd guess the "college girls carrying 40k in cash in a backpack" were employees carrying cash out from whatever business/booth they were running and taking it to their bank or head office or whatnot, and the "off-duty" cop behind them was there acting as a security guard; since that's a somewhat common side gig for cops, and in may places, they're still given all the power and authority an "on duty" cop has.
I don't get the connection to the weed (legal or otherwise, it has never been an interest of mine), but perhaps it explains the other bit.
As for the second part, off duty cops would moonlight as security guards. And the college girls could blend in. With the large crowds it was a way keep a low profile for making cash pickups from the dozen different beer/food stations. It's pretty smart. You would never think twice.
It’s a fairly typical internal control for that type of operation.
Spending some cash sometimes increases the complexity of my pocket considerably, which is fine in practice and all, but just feels wrong to part of my brain.
You meant 'more', right?
If your card gets stolen however, you go to the bank, fill out a ton of forms, pay a fee for losing your card. Wait a few days for your new card to be delivered in the mail. And then, finally can you pay again. In the meanwhile, you are forced to pay with... cash! Which nobody accepts, because not having a debit card is socially unacceptable in our society.
Not sure which country you are talking about but the vast majority of people go to an ATM not the bank to get cash. You still need a debit card to get cash from an ATM.
I haven't been to a bank for getting cash in 10 years. And as you say, ATMs are where you get cash.
Self-checkout person was going "what the hell?" on that one. I also heard her talking to others about being hungry from break being delayed. I gave her the grapes after explaining what I was doing. She was happy, too. Probably did it herself at some point haha. Cashiers trip out to this day if I tell them about that whenever someone is buying a candy bar or something to get cash back. Occasionally, person in line leaves to get a grape. Just one. :)
But I actually assumed just the cash was gone. Either bank or ATM works fine in that situation.
But try losing your card overseas and see how you feel then... Especially if you have to put a stop on your card... Slow and very painful...
Unless you have a spare you'll be asking a friend to use Western Union for bridge finance.
Depends on the card. With Amex or Diners Club it’s not a problem.
I’d rather have the bracelet solution and don’t have to worry about having 100 coins in my pockets or losing my wallet.
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.
I watched a presentation on this, and it's actually very interesting how they manage the ride experience so that even during a system outage they can still let people get on the rides.
Makes the lines for drinks move so fast, it’s really outstanding.
How do they deal with tips?
At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one.
Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choosing a tip amount the bartender is done making your drinks. No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Out of all the festivals, etc, I've been to where they do wristband-based payment instead of accepting cards directly, Avant Gardner / Brooklyn Mirage have the best setup IMO.
Apparently Billfold is the vendor: https://www.billfoldpos.com/
I wonder how many make theirs 1234
Is there normally hassle? In Europe, and I think this generalisation holds in the countries that commonly pay with a card, the terminal is either mounted on the bar facing the customer, or is portable and left in a similar position.
In any case, there's never a pen, receipts mostly go immediately in the bin unless someone is claiming expenses, and the card never leaves the customer's hand.
So it's little different from a contactless bracelet, except I trust Europay-MasterCard-Visa more han a POS supplier.
It helps that there are no tips. If the number on the screen looks reasonable, I don't touch the terminal at all.
The upside is that the US is at this point better at holding on to the principle of being able to use cash everywhere in addition to other payment options; something that is starting to become a problem in Europe.
Outside of nightlife and restaurants, I almost never deal with paper signatures anymore. Pretty much all retail, etc, does digital signatures and digital receipts, paper receipt upon request.
Its still pretty backwards compared to how most things credit card related work in Europe, but gets the job done and is indeed gradually getting better over here (and, as some of the other posts have mentioned, the saving grace if you don't want to deal with any of this is that cash is almost universally accepted).
I can see value for certain specialist places, like a resort where everyone is wearing swimwear. Or a fetish club.
By introducing a new payment method they can be sure that everyone has access to it and limit it to just the bracelets.
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).
https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jwz.o...
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.
Same thing here.
It does seem to be a bad deal for tourists however. I'm surprised that companies are apparently so quick to ditch traditional credit cards.
The danger is that society as a whole ends up making sub-optimal decisions because each person is (selfishly / rationally) choosing to avoid these extra costs.
Powerful entities (even those falling short of absolute monopolies) probably get away with a lot more societal harm than they would if we were more aware of this "coercion of convenience".
There are a myriad of ways Sweden can and probably is enforcing cashless trends through surveillance and coercion. Encouraging banks and retailers to refuse cash services, as referenced in the article, is likely done by the government. This enhances their ability to track and control all monetary transactions for any number of reasons (nefarious or otherwise).
Can we, as a society, just stop saying that?
Edit: Please comment if things are different in your non-Swedish country (considering Europe here, but curious about other countries of course).
I see no need for using Vipps or ApplePay. I place my bank card on the terminal and it is paid, with no fees. If it is over $20 I have to enter the pin. Super simple.. Me and my wife actually laught when we find coins in old jackets, because we haven’t seen coins in months. Almost forgot how they look and feel.
The store no longer has to go to the bank to get heaps of change
The store no longer has to take money to the bank
The store will have no money on premises so less of a target for robbery
The store will have no money on premises so no having to trust employees not to take some.
Nothing to account. Just read the total.
In almost every way, as long as there are enough customers it's a win for the store. Many customers love it too. Most of my western friends visiting Japan get annoyed they can't go cashless in Japan because they're used to being cashless where they are from.
I did run into my first no-cash accepted store here recently. It will be interesting to see how it goes in Japan as they are more privacy oriented.
I agree with all the issues of going cashless. It scares the crap out of me, especially when traveling. But, I can't see it not happening relatively quickly.
...
But thinking about currencies and economy in europe is always kinda doomed because the euro is double-locked. No national economic policy actually has a meaning since at most your gonna leverage some power to influence the ECB, but you're never gonna be the one to actually decide. So there is a complicated combat to do cross european countries saying ok we have to re-found the mission and the organization of the ECB, the relationship with national economies. How do we want to keep down inflation: just maintain growth in face of other world economies that actually grow or make ourselves more independent, what do we do when countries have diverging interests, how do we make sure it's regulated and we keep control on it?
I would vouch for a system where euro exists but is restricted to cross-country corporate business and easy traveling: common credit card system where you can transparently withdraw any participating national money at the current nation negociated exchange rate (eg federating by having a star topology instead of a complete graph for exchange rates: "we treat all the others the same"). Additionally the BCE should have a second decision instance (two-chamber-like) basically being the european budget commission but elected by people, not chosen by governments, to ease cross-country political action. And on a more technical/practical level we have to rethink about wire transfers. I don't know much about how SEPA works but it's probably interesting to take a look.
It also looks a little like those countries with their own national currency but also everyone accepting USD. Tourists can carry dollars, lose a little by unfavorable rates at every payment, maybe end up with change in the local currency to use in the next shop. I remember that on vacation in Uzbekistan.
[#] This is a well-known social/evolution dynamic: group selection. Bees suicide when attacking: individually it's a weak behavior, but globally it makes the group more resilient. The balance between cooperation and competition is a balance between individual power and group power. Europe is a group of groups, so the balance is weirder but having too strong cooperation at the top level (eg enforcing a common economic policy) will weaken countries. But only some countries because of non-homogeneity, thus destabilizing everything by lowering local national resilience (to specific local concerns, which do exist). So i believe we have to accept that we need slightly stronger countries to make the european union stick together.
I would guess some surveillance is involved in terms of audits of banks, but it might not fit the technical definition of surveillance.
Coercion: "To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel."
So if I'm down the street and cash won't let me get on a bus, the movie tickets can't be purchased, food can't be bought etc. There's the basis for pressure. Can't buy food without card, ok you go hungry. There's the threat. I'm sure that intimidation will turn up in a lot of little ways. Public ostracism / humiliation (even at subtle levels) due to not having a card could be seen as real enough to count. The network effects of not having a card will likely cause serious inconvenience.
If "you can't do anything without a card" then you are compelled to get one.
Sounds like coercion to me.
plus cash it's also accepted everywhere
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?
Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
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.
Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.
I would trade all this shit for a week battery time.
So yes, while smartphones are not perfect, I see no intentions from developers to fix that.
Then why do consumers constantly praise thinner phones, and continue to purchase them? I think you're mistaking what you want and consider a good choice compared to what everyone else actually wants and is willing to support.
Both my iPhone and Pixel 3 fit my hand. I'm 5'6.
It reminds me of the 80s ghetto blasters fad. Size was the thing. As they got ever bigger they got far worse as there was so much resonant empty plastic and they distorted and rattled madly with volume anywhere over 2. Size and LEDs counted above all. Sound? LOL look at these LEDs man.
Most recent changes, from all manufacturers, have been deliberately consumer hostile. There's not much left to actually innovate with. Consumers don't want to keep swapping ecosystems - as that means hassle and re-buying a bunch of apps. Often they'd prefer not to even switch manufacturers if they've ended up using a cloud app for photos or something. So they just buy the next iThing from whoever even if it is too big, or is anti case because of edge to edge screens, or has a fake notch.
Talk about Emperor's new clothes.
So what can I choose that's against this trend? Oh. Nothing. Yet I need a phone, and probably an app or two for work. Best buy something or risk job loss. Even if I detest all the offerings as too big for any pocket I possess.
In your eyes it's a vote for thinner or bigger because a sale was made. No that's not how it works. It's not a simple commodity with only one feature to make, break, and validate the sale. To vote by not purchasing I'd have to cease having a mobile.
What do you wear?
My current SE fits my biking gear pockets without fiddling, my previous Android was a bit fiddly. The one before that (my one attempt at a larger phone) fit properly in nothing I own except my winter coats. It had to live in my rucksack, so got left at home a lot, and on the desk through lunch breaks. No surprise that it wasn't many months before I Ebayed it and bought something sensible. :p
Anything bigger than the SE would sometimes fall out of my spring/autumn weight jackets if I just bent over or sat. All except SE got too big for comfort in back pocket of jeans any more. Especially as they get so thin and large as to be asking for a bent or broken phone.
I don't think that's so unusual? It's my other half who's pocket limited. :)
Having two back-facing cameras enables your phone to do computer stereo vision stuff, which are key for 3d sensing and augmented reality applications.
Apple discussed this in interviews after the X came out. They realized they needed somewhere for the camera and face scanner, so decided since they needed a notch anyway they would take full advantage by adding in those sensors and features that could make best use of it. The proximity sensor and speakers could have worked without a notch, but work better with it. These considerations, together with aesthetics related to balancing the size of the notch and the screen areas either side, were the driving factors.
They are told what to buy from flashy ads and multimillion marketing budgets. Keeping the battery week keeps you tethered to your desk and requires you to think about every night b for bend)did I plug in my phone?)
Low battery drives usage. If you had a large weeklong battery, you might put your phone down every now and again without looking at it... a big no no for big tech.
I still wish they had produced a 17" with dual video outputs.
I’d love to have been in the design meeting where thry decided that was more important than world voltage compatibility.
“World voltage are you mad? Who packs a toothbrush when they go travelling? Nope, what the people are clamering for is bluetooth support!”
I've had one US-bought base unit fail and, given the simplicity of the device (just coils for transforming voltage and induction charging) I'm assuming it's due to being plugged in to a 220V outlet for an extended period.
(I have an IP phone at work, and it's an unintuitive unreliable beast.)
Captain is handed a manual when plant life is discovered. Took him a second to stop talking to the book and start using his hands on the pages. It was a pretty quick scene, but humorous.
Side note, the Wall-E short is great and one of the best Pixar shorts, imo.
And audio quality on most Bluetooth headphone/earphones sucks. And now I have to carry a zillion dongles for everything.
But wireless headsets is arguably much better (at least Apple thinks so). So kudos to Apple for having going out on a limb to support something they really believe un.
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.
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.
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 opt out by not using your gmail account as an addres on your mastercard.
and i believe there’s an explicit opt out as well.
this measures conversion but in a privacy safe way, so it’s actually good thing.
the google implementation that is. i guarantee anyone else doing this (i haven’t heard of such though) is leaking data like crazy
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.
Some men from Macedonia slept opposite my apartment in Copenhagen for a while in the summer. They get enough donations from passers by to keep them supplied with alcohol, and somehow avoid being deported (or return soon after?).
People may also beg even though they have a home.
It's very odd to me that you need to be a citizen to get benefits. California takes care of everyone -- citizen or not.
Thanks to the world renowned U.S social saftey net everyone get looked after!
This is why you for example never see any homeless people in SF or LA. If you happen to stumble upon a rare occurence of a person sleeping on the steets, you can be sure it’s at least a US citizen.
<\irony>
No, but seriously, it is true that Sweden (and social _democracy_ in general) is a way of forbidding citizens to live in extreme poverty, to the benefit of everyone.
This is not imposed on the citizens themselves but rather the state.
We do this by having the state make sure there are provisions in place to TRY to take care of everyone. You might have to be able to navigate the society to some extent though, something that can be especially hard for individuals with mental illnesses or drug addiction (in many ways these are ofc connected).
It can also be true if you are actually not a citizen.
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.
That sounds like it makes it impossible for any other phone OS to enter the Swedish market.
You need the app to be able to send money though (iOS, android or windows phone).
Yes it is stupid. Unfortunately it is convenient, which is enough for 95% of the population.
But there are still, somehow, banks in Sweden which don't support one or the other. And, well, useful as Swish is, it's not actually obligatory for life in Sweden.
For what it's worth, BankID and Swish also support Windows Phone… for the remainder of 2018, anyway.
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
I believe inside of Tokyo almost all the machines also support a variety of languages now, but there might be a scattered few with only Japanese.
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.
Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.)
Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
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.
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.
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.
How could there ever be a new mobile OS in this scenario? If stores rely on Swish, consumers have to use a mobile OS that supports Swish, so nobody can enter the mobile OS market (except if they pay Swish to provide a port for their OS on day 1).
It's common for a new product rollout (whatever it is) to have discussions with different companies beforehand, this is how e.g. games magically appear on the market around the same time when a new game console is launched. The game studios get their hands on development hardware and documentation before anyone else.
So I don't see Swish being any kind of blocker for anyone wanting to roll out a new mobile OS in Sweden. Whoever wants to come in first contacts Swish, they do the legal paperwork and then contract someone to build the app.
And it's not like Swish is the only option to pay in stores. It's not that common, in fact. Paying with a debit card is the most common thing.
One of the proposed goals is to have non-traceable transactions. Seems unrealistic to me but that would be the holy grail.
No, Zcash offers the option to always use shielded transactions, if that's what you want. The choice to use a shielded or unshielded transaction rests solely in the hands of the user.
It is true that CPU and memory complexity use to be high for shielded transactions. However Sapling just activated (https://z.cash/blog/sapling-activation-complete/) and it resolves the issue: a shielded transaction used to take up to minutes of CPU time and 3GB+ of RAM, but now can be done in 1 second with ~40MB: https://medium.com/@EthAdvisor/everything-you-need-to-know-a...
Furthermore, Zcash promotes the use of TOR if users wish to hide their IP address.
Also, zcash has the trusted setup issue, which requires that you trust the developers were not compromised or did not store data during the setup, or they might be able to print infinite coins without detection if the data were to be recovered. For some, this makes it a non-starter, despite the efficiency of SNARKS over Bulletproofs which Monero now uses.
Don't let that deter you though. Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo salary. He will struggle to get by without the crowds of new adopters.
There is no "default" behavior. The software gives you the choice between shielded and unshielded, and the enduser has to choose. There is no default.
«requires that you trust the developers»
Not really. In the latest Powers of Tau ceremony, there were 87 participants. This group spans more than just the developers. Even if 86 participants were malicious or compromised, as long as there is at least 1 honest participant, the system can be trusted.
«Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo»
Not sure why this is a problem. By comparison, Satoshi "paid himself" (mined) 1M BTC =~ $6 billion dollars. I'm fine with the founders of world-changing cryptocurrencies being handsomely rewarded.
There is no wait time when recipients accept 0-conf transactions (which is always the case in a brick and mortar store, because 99% of the time it's safe enough – there is even smart tools that verify the transaction is sufficiently broadcasted to reduce risk).
But what if untraceable transactions were limited to small amounts and slow rates, such that you could personally provide for your family but not run an enterprise? (basically that's what physical cash attempts, and as long as the denominations are kept low, it sort of works)
So then you might argue that if it can enable crime, we must do something about it. Admirable ideas, but you then need to ask the question, can we do anything about it? When you ask this, you come to the conclusion that you can't do anything about it. Bitcoin happened. Nobody is in control. It does not care about your opinion.
So the real question we should be asking, is, if Bitcoin can enable crime, and we are unable to prevent the use of Bitcoin, how must our law enforcement adapt to this new world? Then we can stop wasting resources on hopelessly trying to adapt the world to suit law enforcement.
Another problem is that governments which attempt to restrict bitcoin usage will suffer the economic and brain drain which will occur as people move themselves, their businesses and their money overseas to somewhere more friendly to Bitcoin, whose economies will prosper as a result. Also aided by having a stronger monetary base which can't be devalued by central bankers.
Governments don't want to say "we're going to make Bitcoin legal," because they don't yet know how to deal with collecting tax in a world of Bitcoin use. They also don't want to just say "we're going to make it illegal," because they would be doing so at their own peril.
Good luck enforcing any prohbition anyway. We've seen how prohibition of alcohol played out in the 1920s. We also know that many drugs, despite being illegal for many decades, are easily obtainable anywhere there is a demand for them, and largely at the loss of the governments banning them, who could've been collecting taxes all along on drugs sold.
The main reason cannabis is becoming legal in many places now is because it is hugely profitable, and governments want their slice of the pie.
I grew up in Brazil during hyper inflation, and I have Argentinian friends now, so I understand what it means to obtain currency overseas or on a black market, and I can assure you it's a huge hassle and not something people want to do unless their local fiat currency has major problems. If governments with strong currencies start moving against bitcoin, transaction volume will decrease, investors will lose confidence, and the value will crash out. This doesn't require a coordinated effort, it just requires a handful of major countries to start seeing things a certain way.
This was already implemented for hundreds of years. It is called "paying with cash".
Sure, there are some minor edge cases, like dollar serial numbers that are sometimes tracked to catch bank robbers or whatever, but cash is mostly anonymous and untraceable.
[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.
We have known how to do untraceable transactions since 3,000 BC.
1. When you get cash from an ATM or Bank they record the serial numbers of the cash they gave you and attach it to your identity.
2. When you spend those funds at a store they record what you bought and the serial numbers of the cash you paid with and the serial numbers of the bills you received as change.
The government could then build a graph of spends attached to your identity. With high probability they could trace how you spent that money. One problem they would run into is if you gave or received cash from a friend. However while this might cause the tracing procedure to make some errors, it would also allow it to, in some cases, infer which of your friends you exchange cash with.
In any realistic scenario the government would also be intersecting this graph of spends with additional information such as license plate readers, RFID data from public transit, facial recognition,cell tower geolocation, etc... Serial number tracing would be just one data source.
Probably your best bet for privacy here would be pay people begging for money to swap bills with you e.g. exchanging a twenty dollar bill for a ten dollar bill.
Outside that, I've heard mark of the beast from so many people about so many things over the decades that I'm sure it factors into a lot of political decisions where popular vote counts. The wording is kind of catch-all given mark is so ambiguous, it mentions a name, and it has a number. A person can project it on anything.
I still wish we had all followed the Yuki (base 8), it would have made computing so much easier.
Sweden made cash (practically) illegal so now everyone has one less choice.
They can't skim my cash, can't MITM my cash transactions, they can't accept payment and then not deliver (more fraud than theft, but still) because the cash and the object being purchased are both right there.
So I think you are wrong.
This would be abused in the US in very short order. How it works for the swedes should be interesting.
Not at all like cash, which just requires the entity to accept it as legal tender.
It is entirely possible to live your entire life, paying with only cash, in the United States. The hardest part would likely be paying rent, but even that isn't unheard up to pay with using cash.
Society is not cashless. The edge cases you are talking about rarely ever come up. If it is possible to only pay with cash, then the last hop is all that matters for you as an individual.
Which is exactly what happened in Sweden, according to the article.
If a politically undesirable group wants to accept donations, is this legitimate?
Paypal cite the following reasons that they may freeze or suspend an account (at their sole discretion):
- You’ve received an abnormally large amount of money in your account that is way above your average
- Someone has filed a complaint to Paypal about your business
- A series of chargebacks have been placed against your account
- Your website has questionable content
- You are in violation of Paypal’s use policy. For example if you sell drugs or anything illegal, you may get banned
- Your account information is not up to date or your account is not fully verified
- Someone has logged into your Paypal account from a strange location.
- Your credit score is low or something with your background history makes you a higher risk customer
- They have detected fraudulent activity on your account.
> WikiLeaks' founder accused two members of Congress of pressuring MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) to block payments to his group after it published thousands of confidential messages about U.S. diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> Julian Assange charged Tuesday that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Peter King from New York influenced the moves by both companies in December 2010 to halt the payments.
> Assange, speaking to reporters from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he claimed asylum in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault, said the blockade had eliminated 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue and cost the group roughly $50 million in donations.
Of course, it could be argued that we don't have a competitive payments market. But then your proposition wouldn't reflect the real world.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
Sorry, legitimate transactions! We reject you!
This happens all of the time to lots of people.
The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies.
If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.
And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.
It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.
It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.
The solution is to use anti monopoly laws to break them up.
I don't think that companies should be forced to do something. What I instead want is for there to be enough competition in the market, such that no matter how terrible your views, there exists at least 1 one who will work with you.
And if there isn't enough competition in a market, then that's a problem.
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.
Hell, even the USSR had paper cash in circulation allowing some privacy and trade between individuals.
Having solely account-based money under complete regulatory control amounts to a huge increase in what is practical to put under political control. It could drastically increase the incentives to ban and regulate trade in anything of interest to special interests. E.g. the pharmaceutical industry could finally get rid of herbal medicine.
You having pieces of plastic/paper and/or metal trinkets in your pocket plays will not save you from this.
I understand the apparent privacy angle, but if you analyze it further, cash won't help in the presence of a malicious system. If the government cares enough about you to stop you from using e-cash/credit cards to buy or sell, they will also care enough to not let you roam free.
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...
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
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.
Edit spelling
You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.
Good luck stopping that.
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.
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.
It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world, are the ones who control the hashrate, who own the mining hardware, and who choose which pool to use. That is, if a pool were to use the hashrate maliciously, users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.
It is not true that "most" mining hardware is located in China. There is a good portion of it over there for sure, but because of the secrecy around most miners, we don't know how much exactly. It's certainly not ">90%".
Every single article that makes similar claims mistakenly assumes that for example it the AntPool Chinese pool represents 20% of the hashrate, then it means this hardware is located in China. This is patently false. AntPool is one of the most popular pools for various reasons (reliability, availability, flexibility, branding), so they are used by many users worldwide. They even have stratum endpoints in the US for their North American users. Only a fraction of the AntPool hashrate comes from hardware physically located in China.
Banks, on the other hand, censor transactions all the time.
The idea is that no central authority can censor your right to spend money.
I.e. the requirement to report all large cash transactions and prevent anonymity in such deals; the 'know your customer' requirement for cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. Even if your "money" is censorship resistant, transacting with a legitimate business can't be, since all legitimate businesses can be (and are) required to censor certain transactions; and if a particular "kind of money" makes it impossible to distinguish them, then it may well be that these businesses will (or will have to) simply censor the whole "kind of money".
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.
When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.
Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.
This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.
No idea how they got the number.
But it does actually work sometimes.
Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.
Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.
Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.
I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.
People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.
... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."
That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfei...
Good we have a lot of payment options here. :)
It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.
So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.
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.
Its coming
For some of the other things, best practices prevent much of that. I could imagine a common practice where base layer transactions to open a channel use a joint account that requires X of Y signatures, where X-n keys are yours, and the remainder being a friend or actual intermediary business which only facilitates avoiding user error. After the channels are open it having no say in how things are transmitted. I also imagine this being seamless. Each element of a computer's boot sequence were all major stepping stones at one point, and now computers don't even show you the list of things its doing anymore. I see this technology going that way once UX designers figure out how to get paid in this space.
Just another 18 month from now and I'm sure it will be finished.
I myself need to pay for food right now and I do not have time to wait for a solution that is perpetually years from completion.
If you want to perpetuate that criticism, you'll need up to date arguments: Lightning is cumbersome to use and impractical because of the requirement to run a personal full node to connect to AND your device running the payment channel needs to always ben online for the duration of the payment channel. "Watchtowers" solve both of these issues, and they have not proliferated yet.
Yes, this isn't about what you need right now, use cash or a financial network using intermediaries. We are operating on different time frames and most forward thinking things we are talking about are on that time frame. Nobody in this movement is perturbed by your astute observation that it isn't available right now, nobody is saying "well pack it up boys, stale2002 can't be accommodated, shows over"
The problem in Bitcoin today are the same problem that have existed for years.
That problem being that there are too many people focused on esoteric solutions, like watchtowers, 2nd layers, and even 3rd layers, that only developers care about. And not enough people talking to customers or merchants, and building things that make Bitcoin work as an actual currency.
Seeing as the whole point of this stuff is to work as a currency, it seems like this should be important.
It is a rare few companies, such as BitPay, that are building things like point of sale devices that actually make it possible for consumers to buy things from merchants.
Bitpay's solution would have been okay while 0-conf transactions were not replaceable on BTC. But this had capacity limitations that lightning won't.
What you are saying would have merit, if thats what was happening on these particular topics. Wallets are totally not built for customers, but thats not one of the things you highlighted.
a contradiction right there. Security/freedom is a trade-off, and bitcoin has traded away some security for some freedom. Some people like that freedom, but some don't.
> 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 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.
I agree.
Cash or no cash.
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.
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?
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.
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.
In NL maestro/v-pay cards are accepted 100% of the time, because those cards are issued by all banks there.
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
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lZye
Edit: See also this table
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?
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.
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.
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?".
Strawman.... title is built on a false premise that someone argued Sweden's cashless society was a utopia.
Can't believe I clicked on this.
The "advert" was written by the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Sweden.
> no longer a utopia
was it ever? who ever claimed it was a "utopia"?
main points:
- If cash stops working, it would leave all individuals to rely on the private sector alone to get access to money and payment methods.
* One option is to do nothing, meaning we accept that the general public no longer has access to central bank money.
* A second alternative is to issue central bank money in a digital form, as a complement to cash and the money held in bank accounts.
seems like they've been thinking about this for a while
I've recently been thinking about a potential solution to the reliance on private institutions in a cashless society. I guess the problem with a "mobile chequebook" or something of the sort is that you are always to some extent dependent on a private service (e.g. phone signal provider).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_(1966%E2%80...
If I’m somewhere where I think the transaction might be sketchy, I can pay cash and not think about it any further. Skimming, however, is still a thing and every time my card is stolen it causes me an inconvenience that would not exist if I’d used cash.
“Bitcoin/cryptocurrency will fix this!” some of you will say. Perhaps, but it’s got a long way to go. All the USD I have in my pocket still says “this note is legal for all debts, public and private”, I don’t personally think a sign saying “we are cashless” at the cash register after I’ve ordered my food is acceptable (those establishments I’ve encountered didn’t accept bitcoin, either).
I acknowledge what it says on usd currency is somewhat tangential to a Swedish cashless society, but I still think cash should be king, or at least always accepted.
Presumably all of the private accounts that people are currently using are measured in Kr already, and the banks already operate at fractional reserve so the actual paper doesn't exist. As an American, I make about one cash purchase a year, but that doesn't mean that I'm not spending US Dollars.
It seems to me that calling digital money "e-krona" will change exactly nothing but nomenclature.
Isn’t that a problem you have with any currency?
When a cryptocurrency has such adoption, the volatility problem will go away too.
The authorities behind the most popular crypto currencies today doesn't seem to be aiming for stability as a primary goal. The currencies would not be very meaningful as instruments for speculation if they were, which probably is the reason why stable cryptocurrencies aren't as popular.
A government system ideally guarantees access to every citizen/entity desiring to possess "cash". A system run by a private entity doesn't have to do so. If you don't agree/fall out of compliance with the terms of service of a private system, you can be banned. The same can be done on a government system, but at least you have the option of court intervention and voting people into/out of office.
> One option is to do nothing, meaning we accept that the general public no longer has access to central bank money. Such a future would imply a changed scope for the public sector. The payment market would have to be regulated and supervised in new ways to meet fulfil the objective to have a safe, efficient and inclusive payment market.
> A second alternative is to issue central bank money in a digital form, as a complement to cash and the money held in bank accounts.
One solution is simply charging cards like public transit cards instead of using credit cards which are connected to an account.
That’s where a cryptocurrency is needed.
The novel and more difficult step would be to charge the actual cryptocurrency tokens to a card, which could then be spent anonymously without contacting a central ledger. Why we “need a cryptocurrency” is because otherwise we have just let the central bank take the role of commercial banks and credit card companies. Perhaps not a bad thing in itself but not the full potential.
Currently my electronic cash balance represents a deposit at a commercial bank. On the other hand, when I hold physical cash, it is a direct obligation between the central bank and I. As mentioned in the article, 90% of cash balances are electronic money held at Commercia banks.
With a central bank issued e-krona, there is no role for commercial bank deposits, the e-krona is a direct obligation between the central bank and individuals/companies. This means that commercial banks have very different balance sheets to use for lending. It fundamentally changes the financial system and creates very different payment and lending opportunities.
Initially the central bank may only issue <10% as e-krona to avoid this impact, but it makes little sense not to follow through to making e-krona the only form of cash.
Apple Pay was only launched in Norway earlier this year and Google Pay only a few weeks ago. So the propriety solutions have had a lot of time to establish their monopoly.
Also, Apple/Google pay uses the Visa/Mastercard/Amex networks whilst 8 out of 10 of all card transactions in Norway is via BankAxept. BankAxept payments are near instant and has a very low transaction fee. A flat fee of 24 øre (0.03 USD) which most of the time a lot less than Visa/Mastercard that charge 1-2%.
You will find a lot of independent merchants in Norway, e.g. corner shops that won't accept Visa & Mastercard, but only accept BankAxept. This is also why Apple Pay only works in a few places, compared to the UK where I live where Apple Pay is accepted nearly everywhere.
[1] https://www.norgedaily.com/google-pay-launched-norway/
For comparison, in Finland, where debit cards are all VISA and Mastercard, the merchant rate for those cards is usually ~0.3% (with Nets capping it at 0.75€). Non-EU cards have higher fees.
(Finnish source e.g. https://www.yrittajat.fi/uutiset/572780-maksupaatteet-hintav...)
I don't care if it's cash or some digital payment coin/card. The point is,people nees to be able to transact without a 3rd party and be able to buy physical tokens(as opposed to wire transfers and digital tokens).
People are too careless when changing fundamental aspects of their society. Payments can be made convenient,peer to peer and have a small amount of participation barriers.
I have my debit card loaded in Apple Pay, for the sole purpose of making my ATM visit faster.
The ATM told me that my virtual card wasn’t acceptable to use to pull out cash; it advised me to use a debit card from my virtual wallet.
Except, that’s what I was using.
It was 8:30 PM, and I didn’t expect any prompt support from the bank. So, I used my physical debit card.
I consider both real and virtual cards to be conveniences, but they’re definitely not replacements.
I wonder if salt as money will be fashionable again? :)
Prostitution would likely increase, though.
I'll add salt to your list as well.
Recently the town of Växjö had a almost complete power outage, but despite the store being on emergency lighting only, the payment terminals still worked.
When I travel to Europe, UK, Australia I have the same experience (maybe not quite the same ease of mobile payment).
The only reason I'm not cashless here is cash tipping, 99% to homeless people or very poor sales people on the side of the road. For weeks now I've been getting frustrated with myself for not having any cash in my wallet and having to disappoint people, although at the same time grateful for the ease of not dealing with cash.
> The basic concept for e-krona is as follows: it would be digital, and have a 1-to-1 conversion with an ordinary krona held in an account at the Riksbank or stored locally, for example on a card or in a mobile phone app.
> 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'd like to know what this available technology is, that can create a digital object that guarantees a 1:1 correspondence to a physical asset, cannot be duplicated or multiple-spent. Has Sweden discovered the un-copy-able bit?
The only 'novelty' here is that it'd be run by the central bank and accessed directly by consumers.
A centralized ledger would just be regular debit cards but would bypass the banks/visa/mastercard. It offers the benefit of non-cash (no physical currency) but not the benefits of cash (anonymity).
I hope we can get the benefit of both. My money stored on a card or gadget in my pocket instead of printed, but also chargeable through atms or internet banks so that the spending is anonymous.
Not to mention a classic meaning of cash, or just money: you get things for it. If you are getting robbed one thing is to give $40 because that's all you had in the wallet and completely other getting robbed for all money in your account. That's just one scenario.
I'm not sure I would want to live in a society without cash.
Skip the read.
"The scariest part to me about cryptocurrency is not the greed, lies and manipulation. It's a centralized cryptocurrency by a major government. Imagine if instead of cash, you had to pay for everything with a digital currency controlled by the US Govt. It'd be all the immutability of cryptocurrency with the monetary policy of the Fed Reserve. I'd bet the IRS and NSA would love the additional data."
If you do, you're a good dealer and probably an outlier. Also, the further you go up the chain of command the less likely you'd be to run into someone accepting these types of payments as well.
I.e. the middleman might let you Zelle him the money, but he is probably paying with physical currency on your behalf to the actual dealer. The dealer might do the same, but the supplier is being paid with physical currency. The dealer supplier allows it, but his suppliers are accepting cash only. Etc.
Meanwhile you can use BTC to have those same drugs shipped to your door, through an onion based marketplace or whatever, or even the clearnet if you arent buying specifically controlled substances.
I guess if anyone can pull it off the swedes will. And I don’t think they are offering a replacement to physical cash here - just an alternative
Second, this trend is visible in many countries in Europe. In my 7 years in the Netherlands before I moved to Sweden, it would be unusual for me to have any cash on me and in recent years the number of 'pin' (card) only points of sale there has been growing tremendously.
I’m not going to go through the hassle (a few clicks) of replacing my card just to get NFC. The same goes for retailers, terminals get NFC on the next replacement.
In fact, it’s easier now. Before chip and now contactless was ubiquitous like it is now, I got all the krone mixed up. Traveling back and forth from Copenhagen and Malmo with cash was the worst. Couldn’t tell the difference but the locals absolutely could!
Can you survive? Can you pay for your housing, food, entertainment?
How would the the DHS or another US entity know about payment transactions made on a canadian bank account?
And, I realize that cannabis is not legal at the federal level in the US, but how would lawfully purchasing a cannabis product years ago disqualify you from entering the US?
But isn't there something like that already for Canadians?
Alas, such a solution would probably be extremely hard to create and therefore never will be.
This very pattern was behind marxism and all its tragic consequences. Exactly this pattern.
If you like a more recent example - look no farther than the crypto buble, based solely on memes and nothing but memes (well, very clever memes, indeed).
Cash plays a fundamental role in any society - it is means of anonymous, untraceable, quick payments. Any healthy economy needs this kind of transactions. It is literally what we mean by "liquidity" - like a flow of red blood cells through the whole system. Do not mess with it.
The pundits would argue that cash payments could be abused. Well, kitchen knives (even forks!) could be abused too. Shall we advocate a kitchenless society?
Other countries have tried to mess with cash (India recently - thank god they kept small notes in circulation) and the result was disastrous. Again, some disconnected from reality abstract ideas were used to justify the move.
What I am trying to say, is that this is the common cancer and the name of it is Liberal Arts "education", "humanities" and "academia". These people should not be allowed to govern because their minds are distorted with nonsense they have "studied" (memorized). Think of marxists or hegelians or platonists.
Sweden, unfortunately, has been ruled by platonists and hegelians, if not marxists, for last few decades. The results are... well, read the news.
A bank account is a basic thing that's required (at least in come countries) for any participation in the economy and should be available to anyone; IIRC there's an EU directive about a requirement that everybody must be able to access basic banking services.
For me, I refuse to run non-free software on my computing devices, Swish is a non-free proprietary spy-ware. Just because of this decision, I am excluded and made feel like an outcast at social events where money is involved - such as splitting a bill at restaurant. Yet Im white, so I can politely tell my white friends to suck my dick if they refuse the cash I hand them. For an non-white immigrant, telling other people to suck it is not so easy.
The vast majority of Americans rarely use cash, but that doesn't make it worthless to us.
I always have cash on me and it's extremely common here, 60 kilometres outside Stockholm, for people to not only carry cash but to actively use it.
A non-trivial amount of transactions in Sweden are still cash-based.
Yes it is the future, but we will be much worse for it.
/ Another swede.
How do you even buy a replacement phone if you have no phone to pay with?
And do the same for car.
And the hotel room when you are travelling.
Doesn’t seem too logical.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Y'all bitch it's ridiculous (and I ain't saying it's right or that I agree with the premise of having to do it in the first place), I'm just saying thats what people will do faced with the situation.
As a bonus, phones sometimes explode and set fire to things - when they're not busy getting hacked :)
It's ridiculous all the way down.
So you’d have to get an extra service line :S
Even for rarer problems like phone software freezing up, touch sensor going awry, phone memory full but can't clean it (a bug but still), and losing network access because someone didn't pay the phone bill or it's pay-as-you-go and can't afford the top-up quantum - I think I've seen all of those more often than I've seen people lose all their cash.
And then there's the cost of replacement. If you urgently have to get a new phone to replace a broken, lost or stolen one, to pay for necessities - many people don't have enough short-term funds to cover it, nor access to credit.
Some of these can be addressed, but we've a long way to go.
The way I see it some person will have the opportunity to do the right thing and turn it in, or I like to imagine that a homeless will have a great a day.
The only thing that bothers me is my information in my wallet, which I will pay far more than $100 to keep safe.
I have $2 000 cash at home.
Once I’m home I can write myself a cheque, and with my passport, easily withdrawal more money at any bank (or grocery store).
Also, if a natural disaster happens (earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane, Norsemen with iPhones disembark on our shores) I don’t have to rely on any network to buy something. I just pay cash, or write a cheque.
Cash is very robust. (Booze, cigarettes and gold more so, but that’s another story)
I do have a £5 or 20 note as an emergency money in my bag and £20-40 in some drawers at home. E.g. to buy lunch if I come across a food stall that doesn't accept card payments. Rarer and rarer is it needed in the UK, and when I lived in Norway it was months between each time I needed cash.
I do however have spare debit/credit cards at home and my bag as well in case I lose my wallet. (I have never actually lost a wallet, but have left it in my coat/trousers at home etc)
With more and more stores (especially in Scandinavia as the OP details) no longer accept cash, and have not accepted cheques for decades, I am not sure your solution is a long-term solution.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/03/paying-cash-...
[2] https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/no-cash-sign...
I can just go up to the counter and ask to withdraw some of my money and (against my signature) they'll hand it over. No ID required, really handy if you've mislaid your wallet.
I realise this one can't really scale (!) but it is definitely a nice feature.
If I lose my wallet now I can go to my house and I have money to eat. If I lose my phone (or my wallet with card in a cashless society) I'm in a bigger problem in the short term
That has never been necessary in Sweden, or (AFAIK) most other places. I have never known anyone outside of the US who carries cash for the express purpose of tipping. To the extent that tipping even exists in Sweden, it's usually just done by rounding up whatever is owed.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9340511/perstin-experian-...
If you had credit (overdraft or credit card), it is taken away exactly at the moment you need to use it and you're put into unauthorised debt. If that happens you may not get credit from anywhere else. Where I live, even high-interest payday loans will likely be declined at that point.
If you run out of funds, you're probably going to incur compound charges as bills continue to try to be drawn.
In a cashless world run through bank accounts, at that point your friends can't lend you a little something to help with immediate necessities like food. Anything they send is instantly absorbed by charges and/or cancelling unauthorised debt (which was authorised when you incurred it - remember you're on the bad side of banks and they took away existing credit arrangements).
So you can't buy that food, and your friends can't even give/lend you a little money to help - you'll need friends who will directly feed you.
If it lasts for long, you can't rent somewhere to live, and you can't get paid for decent work. (These two things are already bad - where I live a poor credit rating means rental agencies will decline a tenancy or ask for 6 or 12 months rent (and 1-2 months deposit), and people who can't get bank accounts can't take jobs that only pay wages to an account. The two are linked and it's tough to get out of.)
Don't get on the bad side of banks in a cashless, banks-only society.
Even if you believe that, allowing private for-profit businesses (banks, credit card companies) to skim a percentage off of every single monetary transaction to line the pockets of their shareholders is utterly grotesque. It amounts to a mandatory tax, except none of the tax is going to the benefit of the taxed.
At a minimum, a reasonable cashless society would require monetary transactions to be done at zero profit and with strong regulation requiring financial institutions to minimize the cost to the seller and buyer.
Is this something you were doing before?
If not, why did you bring it up? Who do you imagine is doing this?
If you use the "wrong" bill denominations or don't have the right coins, cashiers can get irked at you too. It's so backwards compared to not having to think about it.
Cashless is more convenient. But given how fundamental money is in our society, I would never be fine with a centralized system that controls all payments. That is simply too much power in one place. I know HN is more about startup-hackers than FOSS-hackers, but I am pretty sure everyone here understands that this is a dangerous development.
Yes, sometimes cashiers ask if I have certain coins to make giving change easier.
Also you need coins for shopping carts.
You would have encountered the identical behavior in the bay area if you'd paid for things in cash. That's not because the cashier expects you to have the coins; it's an extra effort on their part to make things more convenient for you.
Often I do not want any record that I have purchased something, I will stick with cash. Thanks.
- Alcohol - Cigarettes - Drugs - Condoms - Feminist literature - Anti-feminist literature - Ammunition - Guns - Bible - The Koran - Marx’s The Capital - Low cut dress
But I do agree with the premise that it is progress in action, it just isn't the case that we are moving towards a steady state but the end goal is still constantly evolving.
They should, it's just stupid not to care about democracy and your own freedom.