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Comment by yiyus | Hacker News Reader

It depends, Europe is quite diverse. For example, practically everything is paid by card in the Netherlands, but cash is used in Spain. Although in these covid times, everything has to be paid by card everywhere I know.

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In 2019 according to the Dutch Central Bank [0] 1/3 of payments is done in cash amounting for 21% of the volume. And 88% carry cash.

    2019                transactions    value
                 cash       32%          21%
          pin (iDeal)       24%          44%
  contactless (iDeal)       43%          33%
           creditcard      0.6%           2%


    ownership                   2017    2018    2019
                    pocketcash   90%     88%     88%
      debitcard w. contactless   73%     83%     86%
              debitcard w. pin   33%     23%     18%
  contactless debit smartphone    7%      9%     12%
          app for p2p payments   17%     23%     31%
                    creditcard   43%     44%     44%

Maximum contactless in 2019 was €25, above €25 pin required. After covid-19 this was raised to €50. All debitcards allow pin transactions. These numbers come from the pfd at [0].

[0] https://www.dnb.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht-en-archief/dnbulle... on April 20, 2020

But in the Netherlands food (and other online purchases) are nearly universally done with the local iDeal system. Germany and Belgium use Sofort, and for Poland there a few parallel systems. France and I guess Spain CCs are used.

Its varied.

In my experience, French bank cards are debit cards not credit ones.

Ah, then there to whole Maestro/VPay vs MasterCard/Visa thing. With CC I mean the latter, but its true they provide debit versions of those. My French bank provide a proper credit-CC though.

Don’t expect to be able to pay anything with a credit card in The Netherlands. It’s all maestro debit cards.

Again, it depends. E.g. in Switzerland you can still pay using cash.

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