Card companies, payment apps and banks are constantly tracking your purchases and profiling you. This data can be leaked/stolen/sold, and is always available to governments and those in/with power.
Cash is (almost completely) anonymous. You should always be able to pay with cash if you want.
If you mean how they transfer money between each other, they just use smart phones and Swish. Beggars even ask for money that way.
One time I lost my card, ordered a new one, the card arrived but the pin code didn't arrive, so I waited an extra 4 days for it, and called up and they said sometimes that happens and then they sent me a new one, which meant I went essentially 24 days without a card.
As far as phones go, so if your phone goes out, gets lost, gets stolen, breaks you have no money because money is tightly bound to your phone.
I have a difficult time respecting the architectural decisions that have been made in this new implementation of money.
If I am using cash I don't carry all the cash available to me all the time, so if I lose some cash it is not quite the same as losing my method of accessing money.
I know, I’ve tried after I’ve spent the entirety of january without without a card due to losing one (and the bank fucking up the replacement).
Also these aren't really problems with a cashless society, they are problems with a partially cashless society. Society will fix these issues very quickly when there are no workarounds, like making sure that everyone can have backup cards for example.
I can create a second card, on a different name than my own, but that’d require ID verification for that different person (e.g. for shared accounts of couples)
Circumstances would have to become pretty extreme for all of these to disappear at the same time.
This is unfortunately not true, because you need a personal number to have a bank account.
An app on your phone is not an alternative to handing a bill to someone.
As far as I understand it, the 'underbanked'-situation present in the U.S. for poor people is not present in Sweden.
Banks are not allowed to refuse account opening to any resident.
> In some EU countries, your bank might still charge you an annual fee for this basic payment account. This fee should remain reasonable.
For someone who is really poor, that annual account keeping fee is a much bigger hit to their pocket when compared to others not doing it so tough.
Between big commercial banks and savings banks, online banks (comdirect, ING, DKB, ...) and challengers like N26, I've never met anyone who had trouble opening a bank account. Americans didn't have access to some non-essential investment products thanks to FATCA, but that's it.
Some online banks outsource this process to the Post: https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postident.html
I'm not sure how N26 does it these days, at the time it was over videochat. I believe it's just a picture of your ID and a selfie now?
However, while you need a German address, no registration is necessary (which I'm only having done on Monday). I didn't even have any German phone number yet at that point.
Don't you need a bank account to transfer money into N26? As far as I know there is no way to deposit cash into any of these disrupter service providers.
AFAIK it's the only challenger bank to support doing something like this for free, even in a limited amount. Even Bunq, which I pay for, doesn't support it (https://together.bunq.com/d/2933-how-do-i-deposit-money-or-t...).
§31 specifically states that anyone with legal residence in the EU must be allowed to open a "basic" account. Occasionally banks will list this as a separate offering from their normal account, but they really should have told you about that. Sorry to hear they didn't.
So now there is a ~1000kr/month fee for using the bank here, with a ~8000kr startup cost, because you need a phone and a sim card.
A) Direct bank to bank transfer
B) Cash
Though in Sweden the 2FA we tend to use is called BankId which is a standalone app only requiring an internet connection.
Oh, so how do you interface with your IP router for this?
8000kr = $63,40/€55,97
As for banks, it depends a lot on the country. While it's an issue for the homeless, it shouldn't be for people who're staying at some temporary accommodation. For instance in Germany, where most banks ask for proof of address (the registration at your municipality), it's also trivial get a valid document from whoever is hosting you (landlord or main tenant, it doesn't matter, you don't have to be on the lease).
Our major grocery store chains all still accept cash (ICA, Coop, Willys, Hemköp etc.) and at least ICA and Coop sells pretty much -everything- at their larger stores. They don't sell mattresses or furniture I guess, but you can go there with enough money and come out fully equipped to go camping for example. IKEA also accepts cash still, so you can buy your furniture there. Or even go get a nice meal there; a plate of meatballs and mashed potatoes costs 39 SEK (~3.7€, $4.1 USD). A BigMac&Co costs twice as much as a frame of reference.
I (a Swede) am able to use cash every single day, and it's not an effort to do so.
To get to IKEA and buy furniture you'll need to top up your SL card using card.
In rural ("rural" meaning an hour commute from Stockholm) you'll find it even harder to get and use cash.
It's trivial to both get and use cash here.
I was very impressed by Sydney's train between the airport and city that can take assorted contactless payments at the turnstile. None of this figuring out how many zones I need a ticket for or buying a $20 card and only using $9.50.
Why couldn't a virtual wallet with just a fake name and a password exists?
Why, other than your privacy? If I own a business, why should I be barred from choosing to not accept cash? Paper money is more labor-intensive to handle and opens my employees up to risk of being robbed for that cash or sickened by handling dirty bills.
As for people who may not be able to pay electronically, why can I not choose to not have them as customers?
If your argument is “because social good and we make those kinds of requirements on businesses all of the time,” I’m open to it but feel it goes much farther than privacy.
Businesses that don't accept cash don't make any money when the infrastructure fails. If your revenue is dependent on your PoS device, Wi-Fi, ISP, payment provider, the payment provider's network infrastructure, banking network, and more that's a lot of risk. For most independent businesses having a working cash register and a bank account that enables cash deposits would be a better option than the cost of SLAs and insurance against not being open.
In the UK embossed numbers on cards are gone now
Nope.
The only ones I know of which do not use embossed numbers are Starling Bank, and (for premier customers) RBS and NatWest. All bar one of my cards is embossed.
Supposedly as of January last year: "Lloyds, Barclays, Nationwide, HSBC and Santander all say they currently have no plans to introduce such cards."
So which ones are you thinking of where the embossed numbers have gone?
In times of unrest, "grey zone" conflict scenarios, cyberattacks....well you should have something to barter with.
For example, on Valentine's day a few million people couldn't pay electronically. That probably translated into a few million lost revenues for flower shops but I have no numbers. https://www.dn.se/ekonomi/swedbank-har-problem-swish-paverka...
Obviously not if the business is choosing to opt out of cash. I assume they are at least competent enough to know how often they have missed sales due to issues with electronic payments versus the cost of maintaining cash.
- it is low key discrimination of un/underbanked. imagine a "cashless utopia" where the only way you can buy groceries is by either:
* paying a "human usage fee" to use the cash line because businesses have axed labor down to the bone
* for those of the "efficiency" mindset, who just don't accept cash at all, the only way to get a credit or debit card is paying a bank a nice monthly fee. because, well, your credit score is bad. or something.
- it signals that as a business owner you're probably on the take on this whole hoovering up data and using it to your benefit without my consent or profit. you may know me as a loyal customer but i'd prefer to stay out of your MapReduce jobs by using cash, and i'd /especially/ prefer not to be sold or haggled over if you and other bakeries (or software shops) decide to hold church and compare lists to derive insight or other perverted data stuff, as credit cards and banks probably do today.
edit: here's a third - what's the environmental impact of having all this tech running (POS terminal, CC database, all the steps in between)? is it >> cash? i don't know the answer here, though.
another reason: when you pay in cash, your debt to the merchant is settled, right there. as a merchant accepting say a CC, if you fail to run an authorization check, you eat the cost. but what if the power runs out/comms down/servers overloaded/etc.? things get a lot hairier.
I mean, cash has to be physically transported, and in large enough volumes you'd need an armored vehicle, which I imagine has pretty poor energy efficiency.
Is that a thing? I used cash my entire life, I never heard of anyone becoming sick because of it.
Data security is my main issue. Companies have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to keep the data safe, so your private information, credit card details etc end up leaked and sold, your identity gets stolen, you have lots of trouble (financial and legal) and the company says "oopsie, keeping you safe is our top priority. Here's a $20 voucher you can spend at any of our shops".
As soon as any credit card transaction comes with a $5000 risk in damages & penalties if you've gotten your 5-year-old-never-updated-with-a-public-IP POS system cracked, the "labor-intensiveness" of paper money vanishes in comparison.