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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

There are real problems, too. One day Swedbank had an outage on their payment systems for more than 24 hours, and this is a bank that has a significant part of the country as customers (I'm just guessing, but it's above 10% for sure).

People couldn't pay for anything, couldn't buy train tickets (all digital). The outage was so big that the train companies had to let commuters go without tickets, so at least those people got to work.

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This is what really irks me here in the Netherlands too. I'm fine with digital payments (e.g., contactless debit cards) for the bulk of transactions, but cash should be guarded as a valid alternative.

The past year I've several times been in a store where digital transactions didn't work for one reason or another (telephone line got cut by roadworks, internet modem crashed, etc.). Fine, I'll just pay with cash in the mean time. Not so for 80% of the other customers: some rush to the in-store ATM, some just give up because they can't be arsed to carry even a single €50 note around.

One problem is that our governments like the idea of eventually banning cash.

That is why I most often still pay in cash. Want to be counted in that statistic. Unfortunately in NL nowadays ATM's are getting scarce. Banks want to drive us towards digital-only payments.

I don't think there's anything inherent to digital transactions that requires a working connection.

your bank balance ? unless you have a digital wallet that stores a balance locally

I expect that just like people should have some cash at home to handle emergencies, people will start to have an extra card at a different bank to be able to better resist outages like this (as well as blocked cards).

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