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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Part of why cashless works is the same reason the Swedish welfare state generally works: a trust of government. Contrast this with Germany and its history with...lists; it's best not to have yourself be too traceable. I think the US is somewhere in-between, but at the end of the day, we'll hand over a lot for 2% cashback and avoid paying for journalism at all costs.

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Another consideration is PoS cost. In Denmark, I know that credit card PoS's are super expensive to rent. And you need to rent them, because if you buy them - which is even more expensive - you'll have to replace them every year. So you need a certain amount of turnover to have a credit card PoS in Denmark.

The card PoS's come in two forms; one that only takes the Danish Dankort (which is the cheaper) and one that also accepts foreign cards.

Which is why merchants in Denmark - at least smaller ones - are still weary about upgrading to the fancy PoS, and therefore need to accept cash some times. Sure, there are alternatives to that, like MobilePay. But usually your problem will be with tourists, who don't have access to that, nor access to a Danish card, and can only pay cash. (Another good reason why governments won't abandon cash; they'd lose a lot of tourists too.)

I don't know whether PoS's are cheaper in Sweden than in Denmark, but generally speaking, Danes and Swedes have about the same level of trust in government, yet there are far more cash transactions in Denmark compared to Sweden.

There are newer solutions like iZettle for cards that costs less. In Sweden we also have Swish, payment by smartphone without cards, but that is also a bit harder for older people.

I've encountered one merchant in Denmark using iZettle. He has since replaced it with the regular PoS. I can only imagine that is more expensive for him, but I wonder why he abandoned iZettle? Maybe it doesn't work that well? I am honestly wondering why I don't see more usage of iZettle. It could just be a Danish thing.

And yes, there is Swish/MobilePay, but that only really works if you're local. A tourist - even one from a neighbouring country - will not have access to that.

We have MobilePay in Finland, but I don't know if it interoperates with the Danish system. Denmark is part of the Single Euro Payments Area, so I would expect transfers to be possible.

There were iZettles in many Helsinki cafés a few years ago, but it seems to me that most of them have been replaced by normal PoS terminals.

Finnish MobilePay, despite being owned by the same bank, is not interoperable with Danish MobilePay. Its stupid that every Nordic country is its own mobile-payment island.

At least here in Finland, I associate iZettle with artisans, coffee stands, small farmers and ad hoc store fronts. Cheap and cheerful. Not that I mind it as a customer, but could be an image thing.

Same association in Denmark.

Yep, same in Sweden. Super easy to setup and you get a complete POS system with built in cash register and emailing of receipts just having a tablet and the card reader.

Costs per transaction are higher but for really small scale the ease of use wins.

Like another poster said -- cost per transaction is higher. iZettle charges around a magnitude higher transaction fees compared to the regular PoS, so for a non-trivial amount of transactions it becomes more expensive regardless of the lack of monthly fees.

What? I encounter them pretty often in Copenhagen. Usually lower throughput places though, probably because the connectivity and the tablet app is a bit clunky but I would guess it is way easier to get started with this.

One of the reasons the expensive PoS is popular, at least in the shops where they have a high amount of customers is that the expensive PoS usually offer technical support with a SLA. The amount a medium - large shop saves on always having a payment terminal ready is more than what it might cost to rent one.

Source: Used to work as a technician fixing payment terminals.

This does not mirror my experience at all, it is very rare not to be able to pay with card at all, even at shawarma/kebab/hotdog stands. The only places that are cash-only are drug dealers and some other places in Christiania and cheap hairdressers who opt in to not report their earnings to SKAT all that accurately.

Also, the Denmark-only Dankort is dying and its demise is happening fast: they are coupled as Dankort/Visa cards and the POS might decide to prefer Dankort but accepts Visa just as well. Neither Google Pay nor Fitbit Pay support Dankort and I have not seen transactions fail that would work with my Dankort.

Also, cash transactions are pretty rare too. Even older people use contactless, I have never seen cashiers have to pick coins from someone's hand as is customary with older people in Germany. Sometimes days pass without me seeing anyone pay with cash. In my experience the main source of cash transactions are German tourists.

That trust is ill-founded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...

It's surprising and worrying how many countries merrily jumped on that bandwagon

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization

In Russia, people logically, and quite justified, distrust the government as much as possible. Government there has a huge history of enslaving, torturing and killing their citizens all the way through today, in way Germany didn't know since the times of Nazis, not even in the GDR. Yet, everyday transactions in Russia are pretty much cashless, people pay to one another through card-to-card transfers and mobile payment are almost as universal as in China (where people don't trust their government at all btw).

The UK is really weird in this regard, things like ID cards were massively rejected as far too authoritarian but we also have a government that wanted to bring in an insane internet restrictions. I think it comes of not having had a revolution in our recent history, much of Europe has the Nazis or Soviets in living memory to inoculate against trusting the government too much, our last experiment with overthrowing the government was Cromwell in the 17th century and he imposed a regime so austere and repressive we reverted back to a monarchy (albeit a constitutional one) and have stayed that way since.

Of course, the German government that made lists did so without credit card records or electronic ids or anything like that...

And just think what they could have accomplished if that modern tech had existed.

This misses the point - the spying-on-your-citizens was decided by the state on purpose, going completely cashless enables dragnet surveillance that makes it really hard to evade if one has to (journalists, dissidents)

Oh, I was just answering the German comparison. I agree that mass surveillance is a terrible idea and is incomparable with democracy.

It wasn't fully manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

I never thought I'd see "IBM" and "holocaust" in the same sentence, but here I am.

They're not exactly advertising it =)

Just like Hugo Boss don't mention their Nazi Uniform Design Division in investor calls.

That's a common misconception. Hugo Boss didn't design the Nazi uniforms, but they manufactured it.

I'll throw out Bayer, Volkswagen, Ford, and GM as companies with Nazi ties worth reading into.

> the German government that made lists

Governments. We didn't stop making lists after 45, in neither the FRG nor the GDR, the outcomes were just not as severe if you ended up on one of them.

Not quite -- they did have some powerful support from IBM... so you are correct, not electronic IDs, but they did have a machine-readable datastore of everyone's address and other details (punchcards, I believe).

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