
Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’ - henrik_w
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html
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EZ-E
Looking at what China is doing is gonna give them more ammunition. I used to
love digital payment but I'm getting increasingly wary of it.

Look what big private companies did with our data, what will happen when they
have all your purchase history and when your daily life depends on them
approving your transactions? It's too much power. Look at the many horror
stories of people getting their money locked out in Paypal.

If the majority of payements are done via mobile (like in China), getting
locked out of it arbitrarly via some random fraud detection algorithm means
becoming a second class citizen. Try getting around without it in China, it's
a pain in the butt

~~~
Mashimo
>Look at the many horror stories of people getting their money locked out in
Paypal.

But if the bank locks me out of my account I also can't get cash, even if I
could buy stuff with it.

~~~
lm2s
Well yes, but you have the option to keep the cash and not using the bank..

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robbiep
The interesting component to this is what happens when the payment system
$hits the bed. 3 weeks ago last friday and saturday in sydney the
communications system underlying about 50% of all financial transactions (taxi
card readers, many ATMs, many businesses) collapsed with the result that if
you didn't have cash you couldn't make an exchange. How robust do people
really think these systems are? I certainly have no faith in a perfectly
digital future (despite being heavily invested in it) - we are but one solar
flare away from behaving like barbarians.

~~~
davedx
I think the systems are pretty robust by any measure. I've never had a card
reader in the Netherlands fail and had to pay with cash before. I have seen
ATM's out of order a couple of times though.

If the payment networks all go down, I imagine you'd also have trouble
withdrawing cash from an ATM too. What's the alternative? Cash under your
mattress for a rainy day? Do you think the value of cash would be stable
enough to be useful in this solar flare scenario? I think we'll have bigger
issues...

~~~
foldr
>What's the alternative?

Withdrawing it from a bank branch.

~~~
zmodem
Many Swedish bank branches (most at this point?) don't have any cash.

~~~
scbrg
Most, by a wide margin. I checked with my bank, and they seem to have ten
offices _in the whole country_ with cash. I happen to live "only" 7 km or so
from one (and I live in the center of a big (by Swedish standards) city), but
many would have some _500 km_ of travelling to do to get to one of these
offices.

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Orphis
The major issue I see regarding a cash-free society (which I am part of by
living in Sweden) is that it puts a big burden on tourists who have to pay a
huge amount of fees when using their own cards in a different currency.

It is also a bit similar for expats who, under certain conditions, can't apply
for a Swedish person number (think SSN) and thus get a fully activated bank
account. No bank account? Good luck doing anything!

~~~
zbrox
I for once love Swedish cashless society and have rarely been inconvenienced
by it. People close to me have had issues due to not having a personnummer
(thanks Migrationsverket). But then there are things like Revolut for example
or Transferwise. This is how we got around it. Although for stuff like rent
you're fresh out of luck if it's not second hand. And the fees for foreigners
are for converting currency. Those you pay anyways regardless if you're
converting cash or each of your electronic payments. I've also seen so called
blackouts that people portray as the boogiemen and the result was not being
able to pay for a couple of minutes. But I've also seen those with cash when
electronic checkout systems were not functioning and the cashier could simply
not print your receipt and take your cash money. And growing up in a more
dangerous neighbourhood as a kid I can tell you all about what cash on you or
in your house means :)

~~~
jarvelov
Regarding the receipt, one can always issue handwritten ones. It is a
perfectly valid form of receipt, albeit tedious to issue.

I’ve paid with cash in many smaller shops and received handwritten receipts,
one time after the receipt printer malfunctioned.

~~~
zbrox
Yeah, I know that in Sweden it's for sure ok to give out handwritten receipts
but I also know of a couple of countries that have a bit of a higher rate of
tax avoidance schemes to not allow it. However even when allowed I doubt
people would be eager to do it unless it was an exception and not the rule. We
are moving to the new normal.

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jeffrallen
How will I send my daughter to the baker to buy the morning's bread with her 5
franc coin tucked in her pocket of there's no more cash?

~~~
louisswiss
She’ll have to go exchange her francs for Euros or Krona first anyway. Unless
you’re going to send her to Switzerland for the morning’s bread...

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tomhoward
Related discussion 12 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422422)
(403 points, 607 comments)

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dtougas
I would be willing to bet that once a country goes cash-free that a second
underground hard currency of some type will develop. Being able to
barter/exchange without being tracked, or without being in the "system" has
too many upsides for it not to exist. Maybe bottle caps? :-)

~~~
HappySweeney
Teeth work great.

~~~
hndamien
Monero?

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upofadown
No mention of privacy in the linked PDF:

* [https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/tal/engelska/ingv...](https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/tal/engelska/ingves/2018/the-e-krona-and-the-payments-of-the-future.pdf)

... which is kind of odd...

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simonblack
What happens when the electricity supply is non-existent for weeks or even
months?

What happened in Puerto Rico and in New Orleans?

No electricity = no money.

~~~
selimthegrim
Half of the businesses in New Orleans are still cash only. Usually when they
start having enough in the till to get held up a few times they see the light.

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ginko
Same here in Norway. I can only imagine the mayhem if the internet fell out
for a couple of days.

~~~
fwsgonzo
Or the lack of care once you get a small peak at who they sell all your
information to, followed by a slap on the wrist because too big to fail now
that society is fully dependent on it. Equifax anyone?

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SirLJ
Cash = anonymity as credit card companies sell your data to Facebook and
anyone else...

~~~
mariefred
I understand anonymity from my wife, but do credit card companies really sell
your data? and Swish which is operated by the banks ?

~~~
fwsgonzo
Anyone not selling your data is just sitting on money-making opportunities for
no reason. It would be insane.

First thing that popped up: [https://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-
sell-purchase-d...](https://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-sell-
purchase-data-to-advertisers-2013-4?r=US&IR=T&IR=T)

So, we know they sell anonymized data. We don't know if its easily de-
anonymizable because that takes some studying, and we don't know what else
they are selling they don't tell you about.

~~~
michaelt
Right, but is it known they sell the data in the EU?

~~~
krageon
It would be breathtakingly naive to think this is not done.

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michaelt
But is there _evidence_ ? The sort of evidence that could form the basis of a
GDPR complaint?

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willvarfar
Anecdotally, I don't know of any Swedish consumers saying "not so fast!". Even
the pensioners I know do their parking with the kommun's parking app and love
swish etc.

Myself, I last used a banknote... at least over a year ago. I think I did use
some coins (which luckily I still had in the glovebox of my car) in an old-
fashioned parking machine recently.

~~~
kungtotte
Look beyond your bubble.

I use cash nearly every day and I see plenty of transactions in cash around
me. It's still alive and well.

Do you live in a city?

~~~
PeterisP
Most people live in cities, and the share is continuously growing.

~~~
kungtotte
Actually only 41% of Swedes live in cities with >= 50000 inhabitants.

~~~
willvarfar
The purpose of giving my anecdotal evidence is to describe the world as seen
from my bubble? ;)

Where I am, a town is pretty much anything over 5K people. We jokingly call
the nearest large village with 2K people a 'town' too.

And I live in the proper countryside. I don't think that a is relevant factor.

I increasingly use swish in shops too. Just recently Swish QR codes have been
plastered to tills everywhere. Its already ubiquitous.

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nextstep
let me pay for everything with Monero; then I’d be ok with this change

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Kiro
I have yet to see one of the new bills that were introduced 2015, i.e. I
haven't seen (or used) cash since before 2015.

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xfitm3
If there is no cash how would you buy drugs or something else illegal?

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crummy
Does anyone understand why cash is so common in Germany (or why cards are so
rarely accepted)? I didn't expect it from a modern first world European
country.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Germans are sort of reticent or skeptical about a lot of modern consumer
technology, I've found.

~~~
chopin
Maybe they are just more aware of the associated risks?

~~~
kmlx
no, unfortunately most eastern european societies are completely broken due to
USSR influences. it was a wide-held belief in eastern europe that the state
knows everything about you and that you should hide your daily life from
everyone, as everyone could be a spy working for the government. this is what
historically underlines gdpr and the whole privacy movement in europe: a deep-
seated mistrust of everything and everyone. even to this day most european
societies that fell behind the iron curtain are still broken 30 years after it
came down.

~~~
krageon
How is it broken to assume you need to be privacy conscious, even when it
comes to the state?

~~~
dahfizz
I think what OP describes is closer to 'widespread paranoia crippling the
economy' than being 'privacy conscious'

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throwaway487548
Cashless is an utopia, pushed by disconnected from reality liberal arts
academics and humanities majors. Sweden is famous for having way too many of
those victims of Plato virus.

Cash is a major innovation in evolution of societies and not for some weak-
minded progress-cosplaying idiots to abolish it in order to be popular an re-
elected.

Let them visit some overpopulated asian country to see _why_ cash is
absolutely essential.

Also look no farther than bitcoin - anything which disrupts or even increase
transaction time will be a disaster.

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toxik
I see a lot of people worry about "what if the connectivity breaks," but truth
be told, I had a lot more fuzz with physical money than digital. I put away a
small sum as a contingency for exactly this scenario that I never used, and in
fact, I had to go change that money to new bills because they became outdated.
It's the same for my spare change; all the coins I accumulated over the years
are now invalid. This could be seen as the physical equivalent of connectivity
problems, and as far as I can tell, it happens a lot more frequently.

~~~
ubernostrum
Are you suggesting that demonetization of existing coins and notes is a more
common occurrence than internet outages?

~~~
lizknope
I live in the US and have never worried about cash (paper or coins) not being
accepted because they are "old."

I have many relatives in India. They all complained about this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation)

~~~
majewsky
AFAIK the US does not ever invalidate old dollar bills. They're just withdrawn
from circulation, i.e. banks return them to the Fed in exchange for new bills.

