Denmark Is the most cashless society I have yet experiences (and I have been traveling a fair bit).
This comes with pros and cons. and I think the reason why it works is because of an incredibly high social trust.
I really don't like cash and am happy to see it basically dead in the country. I'm also very concerned about privacy, I'm that sort of HN person - never had a Facebook account, run self-hosted email for 20 years, use Signal for messaging as much as I can, etc. But I don't think cash is a good solution to privacy. I'd rather see laws and (better) cryptocurrencies as the privacy toolkit.
One common concern I see from US-centric articles is about your transaction history being sold for ad targeting, etc. That at least is illegal here. A store is not allowed to track your history of purchases or similar unless you opt in, such as via a store loyalty card. Banks are not allowed to disclose anything about your accounts except in some investigatory contexts, but definitely not for commercial purposes. So neither "the store will track my purchases because I pay by card" nor "the bank will sell my history to advertisers", which would be major issues for me, are actual concerns.
We wont see those. Instead we'll see more enchroachment of privacy - because cash was actually the solution: existing for millenia, trusted, no transaction fees, no monitoring of purchases, non remotely invalidated, not requiring fancy technology to use, works from buying a car to getting some help as a beggar on the streets.
>That at least is illegal here.
Would that ever stopped companies pulling that shit?
What would you do in case of a emergency or natural distaster? Basically a situation where any of the following is not available for any period of time: power, network, financial infrastructure, access to digital devices.
1. On personal level: Maybe your wallet and phone was stolen
2. Region: Power/Network is down
3. National level: the whole infrastructure is down or under attack
Have you been in such situation or thought about it?
These things can be handled easily: In case of an emergency you can just revert to writing credit notes to each other, which is is spirit the same as cash (contracts denoting that someone owes you something).
> On personal level: Maybe your wallet and phone was stolen
This is the same as forgetting to withdraw money and an unfortunate accident. It is also handled quite well already, as modern people have credit cards in their wallet, in their phone and on their watch. So there is already a 3-way backup that needs to break.
Personally, I'd not use the word 'backup' if you can lose all three in a single accident. Also, these are just different forms of access, none of these would work if the infrastructure is down. It seems you dodged my points.
I'm not advocating for cash, more like warning that an online-only system isn't resilient enough in the first place.
In the scenarios I provided, if cash doesn't exist (as per OP wishes), the only solution I see would be going back to trading goods/services. What valuable possession/skills does a person have.
A personal-level outage is a problem but less so than with cash. I have three separate items on me I can use to pay - my card holder with bank cards, my phone and my watch. That's more redundancy than with cash, which is one item (wallet).
Power or network outages aren't a big issue. I've experienced those and it's smooth. Most payment machines work fine without power (batteries) or without network because they then store the transactions locally and send them later. I've even had lunch when the lunch restaurant was having IT problems and couldn't accept any payments - they noted how many people came on paper and I came back the next day to pay, as I'm sure the vast majority of patrons did.
Bank or card issuer outages are handled by using another card or payment method. If some bank's cards aren't working (uncommon but it happens), mobile payments generally work still, and most people have more than one card.
Major national level outages are a concern. It would be impossible to buy e.g. a train ticket as those require immediate payment, so if somehow Internet was down nationwide, you couldn't get a train ticket online or at the ticket machines. This is one major goal that the e-krona (state-issued digital currency) project is meant to address as e-krona is intended to also work offline.
Over here, like most of Europe, we're pretty safe from natural disasters aside from storms causing local power outages. There are no earthquakes, tsunamis or similarly destructive events. So a hypothetical situation where payments are down nationwide for a significant period of time would almost certainly be part of an even larger disaster where a lot of infrastructure is non-functional due to military attack or something akin to a complete crash of all computers.
The largest Telco was hit by ransomware and this has affected most of their systems. They are unable to receive electronic and card payments, or sell digital packages, it seems their billing, CRM and Helpdesk systems are down.
So all prepaid users are able to use the inrernet and call for free.
All of which are electronic and depend on centralized services. Bank notes and coins work offline and without electricity.
Not too long ago, a restaurant I went to with a coworker had an Internet outage and no card or mobile payment would go through. I paid for the whole bill since I was the only one carrying cash, then we went to the nearest ATM to reimburse me.
I always carry cash. I don't use it often but it always works, even if everything else fails.
We're so dependent on IT systems that even cash doesn't always work. One of the most significant outages we've ever experienced was when Coop, a grocery store chain, had to close all its stores for a couple days because of an IT outage. It didn't help that the stores accept cash - the payments still couldn't be registered, receipts couldn't be printed, so the stores were completely unable to function.
We clearly need a robust fallback solution. Some kind of payment system that can work despite centralized outages (a bank's systems failing) or local outages at the merchant. But that shouldn't be cash. The practice of exchanging fragile, filthy pieces of paper whose ownership you cannot prove once outside your possession belongs to the past, we can do much better now.
Telling people they need to use a less convenient payment method only to keep it alive for an emergency also seems doomed to fail.
The correct solution is probably to force banks and critical stores to always accept cash + encourage people to keep some cash for an emergency. But changing the banknotes (and making the previous ones invalid) every 10 years doesn’t help with encouraging people to save cash at home. That’s another one of those US-isms that blow peoples minds: that dollar bills of any age are legal tender. That and the use of paper checks. I think it was the mid 80’s the last time I saw a check.
Who said that? Certainly not me
Personally, I'm not advocating for cash. I just think it's stupid to brag about eliminating cash while putting all your savings and trust in a fragile system and infrastructure . There's nothing revolutionary about that.
People should have options and backups.
I think people should not have to use cash, and I certainly won’t. But I do think society must have a resilient payment system - even if only as backup.
On that note we can agree. The goal is having a resilient system where you can access your funds when you need it most.
See my other comment for backstory:
That's not so impressive when the National Bank of Sweden for instance is legally obliged to exchange any banknotes it issued for current ones, regardless of their age. You can theoretically get current money in exchange for a 17th century obligation or certificate issued by the bank, though even early 20th century notes are worth more as collection items than their nominal value.
The laws we already have do not work. A large part of Swedish intelligence policy is to trade information with partners like the US, and I would consider it extremely unlikely that highly valuable data like bank transactions was not part of that. The US intelligence policy in turn is known to use such information occasionally for commercial purposes, when it has a national impact.
The Swedish courts are also not trained to deal with low-value evidence data. There is an assumption that if data exists, it must do so because there was a reason someone deemed it worth gathering. This assumption breaks apart when data is always collected as a default, which means courts would need to be retrained when this kind of data is presented as evidence (we are slowly getting there but still very far from where I would feel safe). It also makes investigatory contexts dangerous, especially if records are part of fishing operations where single bit errors in storing, retrieving, copying and relaying records can have extreme effects. This include swish which records are very common in court hearings. In some cases it seems that only a single swish record is enough for someone to get charged with a crime, with the accused having to provide evidence to prove that they are innocent.
That's fine for you but some of us need to buy illegal drugs.
If you think they won’t point and click seize your assets and freeze your accounts prior to trial for publishing the wrong thing, you’re crazy.
Cash is the backup, and must be preserved. Electronic payments can be centrally censored.
and yes, even on small markets merchants charge with a handheld terminal.
It's definitely less private, but the convenience is unmatched. Honestly, I don't even know what the modern Swedish notes look like now!
Of course I asked for payment in cash, which the buyers duelly provided.
But it occurred to me as I observed the new $50 notes in my hand, which were of a new design that I'd never seen before that it had actually been so long since i'd handled physical currency that I wasn't really sure whether the notes in my hand were legitimate designs or not.
I've actually timed this.
It takes ~8 seconds to fish out the card, insert it, wait for approval, and replace it in the wallet. Roughly similar time frame for unlocking your phone and approving the NFC transaction.
It takes ~15 seconds to fish out a C-note, insert it into the self-checkout bill accepter, retrieve the change, and put the change into my wallet.
Delta of 7 seconds.
Let's say you're a typical tech worker, and your time is worth on the order of $120/hr. 7 seconds is 23 cents to you.
Let's further assume you just paid 23 cents to buy $80 worth of groceries as a non-convenience fee so the data brokers and/or the Feds don't know your precise shopping habits.
You just paid a 0.3% "transaction fee" for your privacy. The Visa network takes on the order of 2+% to DESTROY your privacy. You're getting a really raw deal here, by choosing this "convenience".
I assume it is not the case in Sweden or most of Europe. Here in Belgium, the fees are maximum 5 cent or 0,2% whichever is lowest (apparently, to be lowered to 0,1%).
It's a bit higher in France at 0,2% + up to 1% or so bank fees depending on the shop's bank, but that's still lower than anything I'm reading in this thread.
So at least here in Belgium it's cheaper for me to use a card, according to your calculation. Which doesn't take into account what I must do with the change, as I can't always just use a new note and sometimes I'll have to count and use that change. I also have to go out of my way to find an ATM.
For contactless payments, I can see payment taking less than 5 seconds total. In Canada, probably spend more time dealing with tip/receipt screens than the time required to perform the contactless payment.
[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...
He spent 3 months in Germany last year, and used cash for just about everything.
There are still some holdouts though - it's only recently I've started to see taxis that routinely accept card payments, and without a ludicrous extra processing fee.
I've travelled a lot, and I'd say Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all way ahead of Scotland in terms of cashless.
The highest denomination in my country is worth about US$40, but that is a large amount of money. Yesterday I payed for lunch for 4 with about half that.
So I wish the larger denominations would just go away.
Yeah that shit should be illegal.
For me Denmark is best example of modern slavery with brainwashed slaves. I was born in USSR and current Denmark looks very similar. The values of society are too far from what I respect.
I believe if this work in Denmark all other countries should avoid it with all costs.
15 years ago IE6 received its final stable release, but it would still go on to be supported for another 8 years. That’s also the same year Chrome was released, but it would take another 4 years before it overtook IE in market share.
I used cash semi regularly when I moved to Denmark nearly 10 years ago. I haven’t touched Danish currency in the last 3-4 years.
With regards to CC fees, there have been none for (DanKort) cardholders since 2005. I haven’t had a non-DanKort rejected since 2016 or 2017, and the only times that I pay for card fees is when I use the CCs issued to my companies.
Yet somehow, you still can’t buy tickets on the bus with a CC, only cash or apps.
There are plenty of countries where I would not dare to register certain spends on my card or where the risk of using cards would be considered high.
With the rise of ML, and people salivating over the data inherent in currency flow, I suspect that trust may soon go the way of the dodo.
In the US, anything that makes money tends to get helped along. Regulators look the other way (until some knucklehead starts stealing from rich people), and even the lowest-level employees become "stans" of their bosses.
I am a believer in the promise of socialism, but, like communism, it's something that works on paper, but people screw it up.
Capitalism works. It does that, because it is completely in line with human behavior. Human behavior is pretty awful, when we don't have external restraints, so unrestrained capitalism is pretty awful.
Despite that cynical stance, I do have hope for the future. It will almost certainly make me uncomfortable, when it comes (as my own generation did, for my predecessors), but I think we'll prevail.
social trust is not a new thing in Scandinavia. it has been a part of the society for centuries.
Denmark is arguably also more capitalistic than the US. the median wealth is almost double that of the US. hence the Danish system, despite some of the world's highest taxes, easier allow people to build wealth.
I love Scandinavian socialism, but I have also watched as US-style capitalism has permeated even the most resistant societies.
The Internet, and the platform it provides for social contagion, are probably responsible for that.
Additionally, it is easy to have socialism, with a relatively heterogeneous population, but nations like the US and, increasingly, many other nations, make it a lot more difficult.
Denmark, and EU by extension, is far from perfect. But I do see less oligarchy-leaning tendencies in the EU vs. the US. and I don't see that this is currently changing, quite the opposite.
My immediate understanding of US capitalism would be an oligarchic type of capitalism where regulation favour those with wealth already.
Very self-centered, self-absorbed, make sure that everyone else knows you're rich. You are only considered "successful," if you can display certain wealth tells.
That tends to breed certain behaviors; regardless of the society.
The premise itself is screwy because it doesn't account for human nature.
Removing cash makes that hard.