A cashless society works fine in the sunshine case, but it's not inconceivable that the network could go down in various crisis scenarios for an extended period of time (days). Economic transactions still need to happen ...
You can imagine the chaos. Grocery store line got long and many people couldn't buy the dinner for their day, I saw some people calling their partners asking if they had cash. (grocery store at least accept cash)
If say a east European nation decided to invade here, all they need is to blast internet and chaos(looting) would ensure.
Internet outages are extremely rare and are fixed in just about an hour, be it a major backbone outage, a bank server outage, or a local wire cut. In this case, most cafes will switch to a mobile hotspot connection.
Not an issue, and wasn't for like last 10 years. I honestly don't remember when I had cash on me.
I'm not talking about normal day-to-day life. I'm thinking of massive hacker / DDOS attack, radio interference, EMP attack or some equivalent natural disaster (extremely strong solar flares). Switching to hotspot won't help, since that obviously won't work either.
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/06/archives/money-circulates...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_(1966%E2%80...
Exactly what you'd expect to happen in Ireland happened.
Being a cashless society does require some extra emergency planning, but I feel confident that Sweden has prepared as well as you could ever expect for such a crisis.
The net is inaccessible in a way the bank can't fix. Broken cables or something cuts off a whole area even if the bank and the city the bank is in are up.
Is there an established fallback that everyone knows about and is ready to use?
Credit cards used to have a fallback methilod (which was the primary method originally), where if the pos system is out, a business can still process a transaction off-line by taking an impression of your card with a carbonless receipt in this purely mechanical device. The receipts are all deposited at the bank at a later time.
Unless there is some fallback like that that's actually ready to go and everyone is ready to use when needed, then how do you buy soup and heating fuel? Hand written IOU's?
Every time I've seen a payment system unavailable, the various goods and services simply stopped. Even food and fuel. At all big and little scales.
Here in the US a few years ago hackers took down some computers relating to a major oil pipe. For something like a few weeks a big chunk of the country couldn't get fuel. It later came out that the computers that were affected were only related to billing, NOT anything about actually operating the pipe. Fuel could have been flowing the whole time. Rather than allow any tiny chance of a billing discrepency, they stopped the flow and let everyone freeze and starve and die from lack of ambulances etc. (a little hyperbole, idk if anyone actually died that could be tied back to the fuel cutoff)
This and other examples tells me that when "merely the billing" is down, that the goods and services stop too, and all of them, not just the luxuries. It is not valid to propose that grocery stores and gas stations will switch to some emergency humanitarian mode of operation for the duration of an emergency and figure out the crass money later.