Swedes rebelling against a cashless society (2018)
bbc.com
bbc.com
I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea.
I will say, however, that buses not taking cash is perfectly fine. They use NFC/RFID ticket cards which can't identify you. Not being able to buy tickets with cash is a little less fine.
Don't know about Sweden, but in the Netherlands that's widely supported and free for consumers. What's the harm in people using a proprietary app on top of that that has slightly more convenience?
I've yet to have anyone refuse to pay me via direct bank transfer or me paying them in this way when I ask and explain why I don't use Vipps.
please explain. direct bank transfers are still slow (same bank) to unacceptable (different banks) for most payments
> still slow (same bank)
SEPA instant credit transfer is standardized since 2017 and supported by > 50% of banks & payment providers (https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...). If both parties support that then bank transfers take under 10 seconds.
If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. 1 day isn't something you can use in a shop of course, but if you need to pay back a friend it's pretty acceptable imo.
> unacceptable (different banks)
Not accepting IBANs or SEPA payments from other banks or from banks in other EU countries is illegal, and comes with substantial fines.
It still happens in places of course, especially in slow moving large orgs, but if you still find organizations doing this nowadays then you can report them as breaching EU payment regulations (https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain) and that should set a fire under things pretty quickly.
Right, but one business day will often be two days during the week and four days over the weekend, because many banks set an arbitrary cut-off time after which they will no longer process any payments.
One bank I use will process payments received after 12:00 pm (lunchtime) on the next day. So the money will arrive two days later, unless it's a Friday, in which case the money arrives on Tuesday.
A bank will tell me if I enter the account number wrong at least and show me the name of the account holder before I press send, with Vipps you just go without validation.
Direct bank transfers in Norway can be made instantly for a tiny fee, but personally I have yet to be in a situation where that is required.
But also, in any case it's still a bad idea because the payment provider has the ability to just disobey your payment orders, and regulation doesn't help with that but rather potentially makes it even more likely "for security reasons". Payment providers use secret methods to decide whether your payment order is considered a security risk and then will prevent you from spending your own money based on their secret decision making process, or at least make you jump through unpredictable hoops before they allow you to spend your own money. That's a major security risk for you, in addition to all the security risks due to the well-known terrible IT security practices of banks as well as/in combination with the privacy risks of leaving a digital trail of your locations and purchases.
Exactly. We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone. I am all for contactless payment, but I want the option to use cash. The only thing that guarantees privacy.
And this is especially true in places without democracy, as shown in the Hong Kong Protest.
See, in the US, coins are kind of useless on their own. You can't pay for anything with only coins, so giving exact change is always an extra step on top of paying with cash. Ugh.
But in the EU, they have €1 and €2 coins, and it's difficult to overstate how much this changes the dynamic. It means that for purchases under ~€10, it's suddenly possible to pay with coins only. It also means that for cash purchases, you can often receive your change as, well, change. So for large purchases, I'll pay with cash only and receive change, which goes in my coin pouch, and for small purchases I'll give exact change in coins only, using them up.
This actually becomes less onerous than paying exclusively with bills, like I do in the US, because you use up your coins naturally instead of collecting them in a jar or something to be counted later.
It also helps that taxes are included in the price label, so a €5.99 purchase will yield €0.01 instead of something in the vicinity of $0.75.
> We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone.
I have no idea how you do your shopping and end up not getting a pool of useless 1/5 cent coins. People literally laugh you in the face if you try to purchase things with them. Your only option is to give them away or collect them in a jar.
And needing to constantly go to ATMs just to keep notes on you is kind of ridiculous.
However I've also been to card only restaurants in Sweden when the card network was down. There was no plan B, the payment interaction just fell apart.
Bakeries in France now have this as well
Also, i don't need ATMs that often. 100€ last me for a while and you can of course also use a card if you don't have enough cash on you.
Not sure how it is in Germany, but we have ATMs on every street corner, so it's not a big deal.
I do prefer paying via Apple Pay though.
First of all, some cities like Berlin (which might be the worst offender here) are ridiculous in terms of how cash-dependent they are. There are whole areas (e.g. Kreuzberg) where you can't find a restaurant that accepts (debit or credit) card payment, even if you eat for 20+€. So, going out for lunch can deplete your cash quite rapidly.
Secondly, private banking is a huge cost centre for banks right now. This means that banks institute a lot of restrictions on when and where you can get cash. Many common banks (e.g. Sparkassen, Volksbanken) only allow you to withdraw money without charge from very specific ATMs, so you have to know where those are; if you withdraw from another ATM, you might have to pay a ridiculous amount of money (e.g. 5€), which is why you'd only use it for an emergency. Some other banks allow you to withdraw from any ATM without charge, but they have been starting to add more and more restrictions, e.g. you can only withdraw money 5x a month or something like that.
Keeping cash is a weekly issue with me? Not quite 'all the time'.
Still have to experience someone laughing in my face for doing so.
I use € coins for tips or cereal bar purchases. In my country you'd get odd looks if you did that, because we have a bill that's roughly equivalent to 1€. But in Germany or Austria you'll get smiles and herzlichen grüßen because sparing-inclined citizens of the aforementioned countries only tip small change like 10 or 20 cents. Doing it often enough at a Greek tavern gets you freebies.
Hardly. Just have your coins ready at the cashier. Often you can do the math yourself and present the money immediately and in the correct amount. On some glorious and surprisingly frequent days, you can empty your coin pouch in one swoop. It’s a nice little game.
Anyway, nobody is obliged to sacrifice their privacy because someone in the queue can’t manage their time properly.
If I pick up an item that claims to be $1.99, and plunk it down on the counter with $2, I don't want the cashier to say "That'll be $2.16, please." The label says $1.99 . They could have added the tax when they printed it. If they wanted the label price to be $1.99, they could have made the base price $1.83, and added the tax back in to make it $1.99 on the shelf.
If I go to a concession stand at a ball game, their list prices are all-taxes-included. $2 for a hot dog means if I ask for a hot dog, and pay $2 exactly, no one needs to mess around with change. Why can't other merchants do that?
It's not like consumers can just choose to stop buying things if the sales tax goes up. "What's that? Sales taxes went from 8.75% to 9.15% ? Oh, never mind, then, I'll just stop buying anything from here on out."
Every now and then I go to the local marketplace at the city square and exchange my coin jar for a stack of bills. They usually have to pay for the coins so it's a beneficial exchange for us both.
I have about $600+ in a big coin jar with a bunch of paper dollars thrown in. I’ll buy an iPad or a vacation once it reaches the top.
If there's practically nothing you can buy with two of a coin, it's probably time for it to go.
I guess, if you are ok with leaving an electronic trail whereever you go...
Don't the plastic cards cost extra?
One of the most ridiculous thing about this country is that anonymity is not a right according to the constitution.
I fully understand that my opinion is both unintuitive and deeply disliked by many if not most people, so I can only ask you to spend some time thinking if you really have thought this through.
Anyway, I believe there are realistic scenarios where it is good for the economy and society to have negative interest rates imposed by central banks. Cash is one of the things that prohibits this, thus we need to get rid of cash. At the same time we definitely need privacy respecting payment methods. Thus we would likely need to develop some kind of physical tokens/coins/notes/whatever whose value is time dependent.
Biggest problem here is that the amount of people who simultaneously understand the need of negative rates and privacy respecting payment systems seems to be for all practical purposes pretty close to zero, so I am not holding my breath here.
[1] Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can voluntarily choose to lend your money to the bank if you agree with the interest rate. If you do not, you are free to do as you please with your money. Find someone who is willing to pay better interest rates (typically more risky)[2], buy crap, or even buy bitcoin or gold.
[2] Interesting question is, why society should guarantee you a return[3] on your investments if you do not yourself find a counterparty that is willing to pay you high enough return that you are happy with? Smells awfully lot like socialism to me.
[3] And why this guaranteed return needs to be exactly 0%? Why not 5%?
(A note, The questions I made above are not meant to be snarky. Those are the kind of questions I struggled literally for months when I tried to get my head around negative rates and whether they make sense or not.)
I am no economist and those might be more used to negative interest rate if they include inflation, but on the other hand it is just another tool for central banks to perhaps stimulate the economy. In my personal opinion, these monetary policies have not been all too impressive.
But no, I certainly wouldn't give up cash for a central bank to have some tool with questionable efficiency. If we are talking about wealth distribution, we should talk about limiting inheritances or something like that. Otherwise I would assume that bankers are more interested in pumping money in the economy.
I would stuff my cash into my mattress if interest rates become too low. That would probably have the effect of increasing them again if enough people do so.
We have a problem with private losses being put on the tab of tax payers. You would need to solve that problem too aside from the lacking privacy of digital cash to make me think about it.
Some economists are also critical about these policies, so it isn't really clear, if negative rate will help in the first place. That some are afraid of deflation might have something to do with debt, couldn't that just be the case?
Could you articulate one of those scenarios and why negative interest rates would be the best solution?
TL;DR: When even at zero rates, aggregate demand is less than aggregate supply.
Then a small disclaimer. I am not an economist by trade, so whatever I write below is my thinking, not learned from a book. Thus no sources available, and take everything with a grain of salt anyway...
If you look at the (macro)economy in the short term from the central bank point of view, there are basically a handful of interesting concepts here. first one is (real) aggregate supply, i.e. how much crap and services economy can produce. In the short term, central bank can not do much about this. (so if you want to draw this, we have a horizontal line above x-axis on a chart where interest rate is x axis and production/demand on the y axis). Second one is aggregate (real) demand, i.e. how much people are willing to buy crap and services given the current interest rates. This is something central bank can affect. With a small trick. they can move the demand to the future or from the future by adjusting the interest rate. If interest rates get higher, people take less loans to buy crap and save more. The opposite when interest rates go lower. (thus, in our drawing, we have a downward sloping line for demand. Draw it so that it crosses the supply on the left of Y-axis for this exercise).Third one is inflation, which I will come back a tiny bit later.
So, now we have a nice (kind of) supply and demand chart. And we see that if we limit the interest rate to zero, we will have oversupply in the economy. That translates to things like unemployment, lower profits for the corporates etc. So we really would like to get the interest rate to the point where supply and demand are equal.
But what about the inflation? One solution would be to have 5% inflation so that zero interest rates would mean -5% interest rates and all would be good again, right? Yep, kind of. If you look again a the chart, where we could find more inflation is where the demand is higher than supply. But that area is even further to the left. To induce inflation, central bank should push the rates even lower than the equilibrium state. and that's why our economies have been between rock and a hard place so long. If we had had an inflation target of 5% in the first place, our life would be much easier. But now we are stuck. And central banks do not have that many options. They can do their best to push the yield curve down to ease as much as possible, but also that has limits. So we are banging against the zero floor and only thing central bank can do is wait for cashless economy or long term economic growth that will increase the aggregate demand. But that is, of course, hampered by lack of demand. Shitty place to be in, today's central bank.
The argument against this is "oversupply in all sectors, so nowhere to reallocate the supply to", but this is clearly nonsense when people are demanding better housing, healthcare, and education.
1. Prices (especially wages) are sticky. Interest rates you can adjust overnight, but to get the adjustment of wages can easily take years.
2. Economy is not actually nicely behaving equilibrium seeking thingy, but a complex, chaotic system with various time constants. So we actually need a body that works to stabilize the mismatches of aggregate supply and demand. So it is not "artificially propping" demand, but trying to actively keep demand and supply aligned. And people may be "demanding" better housing, but it does not mean they can afford to.
Granted, that would cause unemployment in the industries that people would rather give up consuming from, but maybe that would free up some talent to go into building houses - isn't that how the capitalist system is supposed to work, that things people don't want don't get produced?
the real threat is the trail created which no government is going to allow you to vacate. just the possibility of a prior acquaintance or business transaction running afoul of the can give some the means to penalize you for past legal deeds in some countries. let alone put you under the scope for having performed now illegal activities, after all why would the want to suspect you aren't predisposed to do it again?
finally it really can be used to put a damper on people just leaving high tax areas because they can just electronically debit you for the act.
I also don't see that there's much difference between nominal negative rates on the one hand and ZIRP plus inflation on the other, which is what pretty much all the big central banks are doing already and which cash doesn't protect against at all. They both punish saving at a time when the ratio of retired to working people is increasing and the latter's ability to support the former is looking shaky.
There's a separate argument to be had about financial repression [1], but it's a bit more contentious and I don't think you need to accept the badness of that to be against negative interest rates.
Once you take out the fact that e.g. messages you write are being recorded, your speech is being monitored 24/7 by a microphone in your home, or all your text input is being stored in somebody's server halfway across the world, those technologies could have the potential to be really neat indeed.
One can dream.
Cash is a way into those grey areas.
So that you can not have a phone, or be a hobo, be off the grid, go to a gay bar without leaving a trace, hold a controversial artistic/polical/religious event, let a beaten spouse organize an escape, mess around as a kid without your parents always knowing everything, try a product the state doesn't approve of and so on.
Pretty easy to ping these cards and any wireless ID (IMSI, WiFi MAC). Enough hits and the correlations will easily fall in to place.
There has been incredible lobbying for this. This is the ultimate capitalist's wet dream: making a profit on every transaction. The privacy angle is tangential, just collateral in the land-grab, just one more way to squeeze the last drop of profit out of everything you do.
Besides, the sharing of the data with 'authorities' was the lube that pushed these systems in. Gotta catch them terrorists, right. No no no, it might seem like a grandparent giving $50 dollar to her grandson on his birthday, but I'm telling ya'll, terrorism.
E.g. When you use the card to pay for A, the receiver many query in a federate system and found that you also paid for B recently.
Much of the current Swedish society is currently closed to me, I know of three shops and one cafe in the (200k people) city center that accept cash. Some of it has been gradual but it changed dramatically during the time I was away.
Believe me, this is not the kind of world anyone really wants to live in. It's all very convenient until the crap hits the fan, putting this much power in the hands of any authority is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention those who have no choice.
Only reason to keep cash IMO is for accessibility.
Some authority, not the absolute surveillance and control this path leads to.
Umm, could you explain how this would work? Money has typically emerged as a "universal barter," like gold or tobacco (in colonial Virginia for ex.) or cigarettes in prisons that can be exchanged for anything in the assumption that they will always be in demand. So I can trade you gold for your sysadmin work (simply indirect "barter") and you can trade the gold for drinks at night, breakfast cereal, a NYTimes.com subscription, etc. But you can't trade your sysadmin work for any of those because it can't be divided up like that. So whenever you try to have a direct barter system you'll just end up with some kind of money by necessity, maybe gold, silver, seashells, etc. It's merely a higher abstraction on top of the barter, thus "universal barter." And indeed for the NYTimes sub you'll need some kind of e-gold...
Money can be stored to use later but its value is always based on the current amount of money in use and the current amount of goods and potential services/labor. Hoarding it in Smaug's lair under Lonely Mountain is bad not because Smaug is thus in the wealthiest 0.00001% of inhabitants of Middle Earth (meaningless since he doesn't actually use the money) but because by removing the supply of money he has been creating deflation and is thereby depressing economic activity. Decreasing the supply of money means falling prices (because there's less exchange-medium, not because there's more production) means debts are harder to pay back, ppl hoard what's left and the dour mood discourages future economic activity. When Bilbo frees the hoard there will be massive inflation but also a burst of economic activity (i.e., work). It's true that with only direct barter there would be no problems (or benefits) from increasing or decreasing the money supply, but you'd have much bigger problems. Remember that money is not itself value but merely a means of exchange, one way to measure value, and storing that money is a way to make a future claim on an amount of future value. Economists are simplifying when they say that money is a "store of value." You're actually just storing a claim on future value. How much value? However much you can get for that amount of money at the moment someone trades you something for it and regardless of the value when you initially stored it.
"Modern" paper money, "reserve notes" used in lieu of the notes' corresponding gold or silver stored for example at a goldsmith, was quickly abused as the reserve keepers learned that they could lend more notes than they had metal, thus creating a kind of virtual store of money (or if money is economic RAM, virtual RAM?), and what might have started as a kind of scam was soon recognized as a great boon because the money supply could expand when there was an opportunity for increased work/production of value and shrink back down if and as the opportunity came to a close. Of course this credit money system a.k.a. Our World has perils and requires constant maintenance and repair but without it we'd be far worse off, more unequal, less healthy, more wretched and to return to your original point, we'd most likely be controlled by more direct and onerous authorities. And with just direct barter we'd be in... the stone age?
>You must now accept more authority because you accepted some initial amount of authority
I don't follow
Out of interest, do you have some ideas on specific measures that could/should have been implemented to stop this development towards less cash?
Interestingly, if you talk about cash in Sweden the comments you will get tend to be very hostile. It's like talking about meat in a vegan community.
I've come to a point where I feel like it's my responsibility to do whatever I can, and getting a card or phone with Swish would make it too easy.
There's some serious programming going on, it's sort of a Swedish tradition to brainwash people into policing each other.
Extreme political correctness is not something people are born with, it's conditioning via media and from observing how people who dare to question anything are treated.
Through the MCC they already have that information - they just exposed it to you.
> While the original intention was as satire, Kim Orlin Kantardjiev, a Norwegian politician and educational advisor, claims that the Law of Jante is taught in schools as more of a social code to encourage group behaviour.
If real life gets funnier than the original work, satire really gets into problems...
Can't quite remember the name, something about 'Libertyville' which was ironic I think.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374303908?tag=duckduckgo-d-20&lin...
Though I must say Germany too is changing fast - 7 years ago most places didn't take cards, now most places do. And I've even heard of cash-less bars popping up in Berlin. So the change is coming there too, only a bit later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9vP_RoCdM
https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-nega...
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.
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.
I'm across the border in Norway and when I moved here I was locked out of pretty much everything because I didn't have a bank account with a BankID (a proof of identity service provided by your bank and used for all government websites and many private businesses). Without that it gets incredibly difficult to do anything.
So a Swedish citizen who is not a Swedish resident is completely cut off.
How do you navigate without Maps, Uber, etc.? Do your friends know you won't reply to texts?
Maybe I'll buy a separate flip phone and leave the smart phone and credit cards at home just in case.
Also, regarding texts, I carry an iPhone, but I'll answer text messages when it fits in, which can take hours. Don't want my phone to control my life.
If you don't mind a small increase to travel time you can usually reduce the number of steps to get to any particular place to a small and conveniently memorable amount.
These options still exist, but I don't think Uber wants this business.
It amuses me that it sounds like zen buddhism or something super extreme when it is how almost everyone operated 5-10 years ago.
I was 19 before I got a cell phone. Now I travel internationally quite frequently so I'm jealous of people who are can go no phone.
Also I didn't have friends or a real job until I was 25, so though I grew up with AOL CD ROMs and Netscape and dialup and cassette tapes, the start of my social life coincided with smartphone ownership.
It's crazy how everyday reality from 20 years ago is now seen as unimaginable as hermitic living.
It was more frustrating than it was fun. Then came unlimited Internet and online maps I could print out. Then ubiquitous fast Internet, and smartphones with GPS and compasses! Built-in maps that will lead you straight where you need to go. No more asking for or giving painful directions, just use your navigator/phone/tablet!
Nowadays I can travel to almost anywhere in the world and find my way with just my phone! Amazing!
We are more likely to just point our motorcycles in a random direction and figure out where we're going later now that we have GPS in our pockets. It's like an absolute safety net for adventure!
I ask people, you'd be surprised how much easier it is to find your way somewhere by getting directions from a real live human with local knowledge. And they're generally more than happy to help someone out.
There's still SMS, even if it's a bit more expensive and less convenient.
Go for it :)
The main thing I want to see is stronger privacy laws regarding transactions. There's some hope here with the EU. Data mining of purchase history should be banned outright for instance. That said, even though I'm privacy-concerned, I don't view cashless payments as one of the bigger threats. I refuse to own any store loyalty cards because they give the store an exact list of what I buy, tied to my identity, which is a much bigger privacy threat. My bank does know which grocery store I shop at, but that can be guessed with very high confidence anyway based on my address, which is public.
I'd like to see Sweden at the forefront of developing cashless societies. The national bank is testing the platform a state-backed cryptocurrency. With the right combination of technological and legal mechanisms, that is very much something I would like to see.
Sorry, what? I literally bought my lunch with cash the other day when the restaurant I went to had lost its power. Where do you pull these assertions from?
A lunch restaurant near my office had a total outage once, couldn't take any payments. Things worked out just fine on an honor system then - they wrote down names and amounts on paper, and asked people to pay in the next days.
What doesn't work currently is resilience against long-lasting technical problems. If there's no power in an area for several days, there's no sensible way for the current cashless technologies to work.
You're engaging in self delusion if you think the almost uniformly cashless payment systems you embrace in Sweden don't already cause this to be the case about you down to the minutest level: with your payments, where you make them, what you buy, when, and a very fine-grained general profile of your daily activities and movements (paying digitally in any phyiscal location obviously ties you to said location at a certain place and time). It's almost absurd that you even mention concerns about "potential" privacy invasions while claiming the system you live in is in any way a good thing, just because it's convenient. None of this is to mention the problems it could cause if some sort of major disaster occurs or a data breach somewhere in the chain causes part or all of your entire history of payments to become commodity data should anyone ever want to use it against you in some way..
Not to mention the potential future ramifications of paternalistic or authoritarian government policies being used to "guide" your buying habits and personal life through a near total capacity to access your purchase history, and then tying this to regulatory "incentives". It would be all too easy for a government to implement something like this under the right circumstances if the entire consumer economy is already cashless and run through large institutions. That you think this isn't a problem indicates a deep blindness to just how important fundamental privacy via untraceable payments on a basic level is to any society that does value a modicum of breathing space for a sincerely private life.
Also, there's a vast margin of difference between some bank or other third party guessing where you shop with cash because of your address and them knowing exactly what you bought and where by (very easily) monitoring your digital payment activities.
As for the broader privacy implication, that is something I would hope a national cryptocurrency addresses. While cash is anonymous, anonymity is not a property exclusive to cash. From my point of view, everything sucks about cash except anonymity - so, by a software analogy, it makes more sense to port anonymity to cashless systems than to maintain a legacy cash system.
You're partly correct, partly wrong -- as far as I know the payment provider doesn't have/store this data but can request it from merchants. Merchants have to opt in, but by now I assume all the large ones are in, at least.
These APIs can be used to get purchase details such as item names, quantities, and tax rates. See e.g. https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/visa-cardholder-purc...
Also worth noting that bank privacy is protected by law, and it's a criminal offense for the bank to violate that by, for instance, telling a marketing company where I shop.
While not perfect, I'm fairly comfortable with this level of legal protection for my data.
Just pointing out that links to this data do exist, even if it has strong legal protections/opt-in barriers.
Usually they sell it aggregated for reporting purposes but that's not to say they can't break it down to get to your granularity.
There is some hope here ... that there will be new rules to ignore?
Like, how do you think such rules could ever be enforced effectively and in a way that the public can actually trust that it is being enforced effectively (to avoid chilling effects)? Plus, how do such rules prevent data leaks due to security problems?
It's like you want to build a system that is maximally vulnerable to abuses and then just declare that using those vulnerabilities is theoretically not allowed instead of using the technology that we know reliably preevents all those problems. How isn't that completely naive at best? Next we'll remove all authentication from IT systems and just make it illegal to log into systems without authorization? How well do you think that would work?
Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones.
How is that "of course"? Not excluding one or the other a priori is one thing, but why would it be the obviously right choice to always use a combination of both?
> Ban sharing of purchase data (legal measure) and also build systems to the data is encrypted with your on-card key (technical measure).
How would that "encrypting with your on-card key" thing work?
> Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones.
How does it follow that when you have a social problem, you need a legal solution? That seems like a complete non-sequitur to me.
I guess I've always thought of the two as complementary. You have a goal to encourage or discourage some behavior, or address a problem, so you want both technical and legal measures. You don't want cars stolen, so you make that illegal and also add anti-theft technology to the cars. You want people to pay taxes, so you also develop a system that makes declaring and paying very easy for most. You want protect privacy, you complement legal protections with technology that helps achieve it.
> How would that "encrypting with your on-card key" thing work?
I don't know exactly, it's not my area of expertise. My understanding is that EMV cards have a unique keypair stored on them, in which case it's not a big stretch to imagine a process that encrypts the exact record of what you bought with the card's private key, so it's a technical impossibility to decrypt without your consent.
> How does it follow that when you have a social problem, you need a legal solution? That seems like a complete non-sequitur to me.
I'm a bit baffled - it seems pretty clear to me that legal changes have been a major part of our general progress as a society, and have in most cases been part resolving social problems. Sometimes we change the law to get to a desired solution, sometimes we change the law to enshrine an established solution. With privacy being a social problem, we need both better technology and better laws.
In general, sure, but in any particular case? Essentially what I said before: It's not useful to exclude one or the other a priori, but it seems perfectly sensible to end up with purely technological solutions to some problems and with purely legal solutions to some others. Or phrasing it differently: It's not useful to set the balance of technological vs. legal solutions a priori. For some problems, a 99% technological/1% legal solution might be the right balance.
> My understanding is that EMV cards have a unique keypair stored on them, in which case it's not a big stretch to imagine a process that encrypts the exact record of what you bought with the card's private key, so it's a technical impossibility to decrypt without your consent.
Well, I'm not sure that that's the case currently, but given that they are smart cards, that sure would be a possibility. But it wouldn't really help much anyway, because that (a) doesn't hide who paid how much when to which vendor, which is already a huge privacy risk and (b) can not prevent collusion between vendors and banks. The vendor knows what they sold you in that transaction, there is no real way to force them to forget that. And also, if it's a card handed to you to your bank, how do you know they don't know the key? The only way to reliably enforce privacy there is to make the payment anonymous the way cash does.
Of course, one could maybe build something like digital cash, but that would probably look closer to bitcoin than to credit cards or bank transfers.
The point here is: It's not helpful to just say "solve this with crypto" if you can't really explain how crypto would actually solve the problem while sort-of dismissing the actual technological solution to the problem: cash.
> I'm a bit baffled - it seems pretty clear to me that legal changes have been a major part of our general progress as a society,
Well, yeah, sure!?
> and have in most cases been part resolving social problems.
Have they? That seems questionable to me, and also pretty difficult to even quantify. And also, it doesn't really get you to your claim anyway if is't just "most cases", does it?
> Sometimes we change the law to get to a desired solution, sometimes we change the law to enshrine an established solution.
And sometimes neither of those because technology simply makes the problem disappear?
I mean, I don't have any objection to legal solutions to problems, I just don't see how it makes sense to say a priori that legal measures must be a part of the solution to some problem, instead of looking at the effectiveness of various approaches and choose a good approach based on that. If legal rules regarding personal data are basically unenforceable and we have strong evidence that the ones we already have are constantly being ignored, then maybe the technical solution of using a payment system that doesn't give anyone even the chance to collect personal data to abuse is the effective solution? Why should we prefer a (more) legal solution when all the evidence suggests that it doesn't work?
I guess another way to look at this is to consider that legal solutions without some sort of technological foundation can actually not work for anything. What I mean by that is: Writing down a bunch of rules alone does not solve any problems. Only when there is some structure that ensures that those rules are actually being followed does a legal solution become effective. Which thus also means that if you make rules where it is impossible in practice to ensure that they are being followed, you do not actually have a solution at all.
Is that legal? I believe in most countries national currency most be accepted in any form, by law...
There are movements in both places to require merchants to accept cash, but I don't know of any countries that have adopted them yet. (Some cities in the US have.)
When cash is made sufficiently less used in society, and there are strong interests in this direction, cash is regarded as some sort of paper gift card for real money.
And if they can track it for the people that want that, they can track you.
I have difficulties imagining the crap hitting fan that simultaneously breaks down electronic payment systems but rather miraculously keeps the purchasing power of paper money intact for any extended time. Could you maybe elaborate why you consider this specific scenario likely enough to worry about?
[1] However, given everything I know (which is not much) about US financial system, I do understand that people there worry about things like this
I'm not the OP, but I can also read it as "crap hits the fan for me", and this makes it simple to imagine ways in which a person can lose access to digital payment (by theft, by being blocked by the bank for whatever reason, etc.) and if this happens, life would be difficult on a cash-less society until this access is regained.
Just imagine if you're accidentally identified as a financial supporter of terrorism or something like that, and your bank accounts are blocked. How would you buy even basic necessities if cash is not allowed?
>Just imagine if you're accidentally identified as a financial supporter of terrorism or something like that, and your bank accounts are blocked
Then make it illegal for bank to block your account or whatever.
Sure, digital payment has its issue but why not fix the issue instead of going back to cash.
Regulation in the UK requires banks to accept almost anyone -- it looks like there's still no luck for people suspected of fraud, or without a fixed address.
https://www.which.co.uk/money/banking/bank-accounts/best-ban...
Sometimes it’s fraud. Imagine not being able to eat because your card was locked by the bank.
I don't know if I can find any English sources but here is one from the ombudsmand in Danish: https://www.forbrugerombudsmanden.dk/hvad-gaelder/betalingst...
Retail in Denmark does not particularly like to take cash and you can see a lot of signs about "no cash stored after closing" and empty register drawers etc. in Copenhagen. I would expect lots of these stores to switch to cash-only as soon as they can. Such a law happened in Sweden already and you just need to go to Malmö C to see stores not accepting cash at all.
I think Denmark introduced that law after seeing what had happened in Sweden.
The legal reasoning is based on freedom of contract (avtalsfrihet). The shop has to take cash, but since what the shop does is enter a contract with you (agrees to sell certain goods for a certain price), it can choose to make cashless payment a condition of the contract. The same reasoning gives the shop the freedom to only accept paper bills and not coins for instance.
This doesn't apply to public entities as freedom of contract is much more limited or non-applicable there - a public hospital must allow patients to pay in cash.
Yes. Because not carrying a smartphone and a credit card in Sweden and only carrying cash is basically like traveling in from Japan with a bunch of Yen in your hand. Of course society isn't open to you if you don't carry the local currency (which is card and smartphone transactions). A bit exaggerated, perhaps, but that's where we are now, like you noticed.
A solution might be to allow shops to charge extra for cash transactions. That is, force shops to accept cash, but at the same time allow them to discourage people to not use it. That way they don't need to run to the bank with cash so often, but they also have a cash system in place for when the crap hits the fan.
There is absolutely zero chance that Sweden will somehow go back to be a place where people regularly use paper money. That just won't happen. What we need is a system that is resilient, accessible, and has decent integrity protection despite people not using paper money.
Yes, exactly.
> Perhaps settled on a publicly accessible ledger with decentralized infrastructure not relying on any single party?
The current project is backed by the riksbank (Sweden's central bank). I think for cryptocurrency to be viable as a proper replacement for cash this is how it should work. The central bank guarantees the value of the digital currency by setting it to be the same as the existing cash.
I'm not sure exactly how the ledger would be maintained in a way that both lets me go to a shop and buy something without the central bank knowing who owns the token, while at the same time offering no less visibility than the current system does in terms of larger scale transactions (e.g. if I go into a bank with a large amount of cash to deposit I'll get questions regarding money laundry etc).
Card companies, payment apps and banks are constantly tracking your purchases and profiling you. This data can be leaked/stolen/sold, and is always available to governments and those in/with power.
Cash is (almost completely) anonymous. You should always be able to pay with cash if you want.
If you mean how they transfer money between each other, they just use smart phones and Swish. Beggars even ask for money that way.
One time I lost my card, ordered a new one, the card arrived but the pin code didn't arrive, so I waited an extra 4 days for it, and called up and they said sometimes that happens and then they sent me a new one, which meant I went essentially 24 days without a card.
As far as phones go, so if your phone goes out, gets lost, gets stolen, breaks you have no money because money is tightly bound to your phone.
I have a difficult time respecting the architectural decisions that have been made in this new implementation of money.
If I am using cash I don't carry all the cash available to me all the time, so if I lose some cash it is not quite the same as losing my method of accessing money.
I know, I’ve tried after I’ve spent the entirety of january without without a card due to losing one (and the bank fucking up the replacement).
Also these aren't really problems with a cashless society, they are problems with a partially cashless society. Society will fix these issues very quickly when there are no workarounds, like making sure that everyone can have backup cards for example.
I can create a second card, on a different name than my own, but that’d require ID verification for that different person (e.g. for shared accounts of couples)
Circumstances would have to become pretty extreme for all of these to disappear at the same time.
This is unfortunately not true, because you need a personal number to have a bank account.
An app on your phone is not an alternative to handing a bill to someone.
As far as I understand it, the 'underbanked'-situation present in the U.S. for poor people is not present in Sweden.
Banks are not allowed to refuse account opening to any resident.
> In some EU countries, your bank might still charge you an annual fee for this basic payment account. This fee should remain reasonable.
For someone who is really poor, that annual account keeping fee is a much bigger hit to their pocket when compared to others not doing it so tough.
Between big commercial banks and savings banks, online banks (comdirect, ING, DKB, ...) and challengers like N26, I've never met anyone who had trouble opening a bank account. Americans didn't have access to some non-essential investment products thanks to FATCA, but that's it.
Some online banks outsource this process to the Post: https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postident.html
I'm not sure how N26 does it these days, at the time it was over videochat. I believe it's just a picture of your ID and a selfie now?
However, while you need a German address, no registration is necessary (which I'm only having done on Monday). I didn't even have any German phone number yet at that point.
Don't you need a bank account to transfer money into N26? As far as I know there is no way to deposit cash into any of these disrupter service providers.
AFAIK it's the only challenger bank to support doing something like this for free, even in a limited amount. Even Bunq, which I pay for, doesn't support it (https://together.bunq.com/d/2933-how-do-i-deposit-money-or-t...).
§31 specifically states that anyone with legal residence in the EU must be allowed to open a "basic" account. Occasionally banks will list this as a separate offering from their normal account, but they really should have told you about that. Sorry to hear they didn't.
So now there is a ~1000kr/month fee for using the bank here, with a ~8000kr startup cost, because you need a phone and a sim card.
A) Direct bank to bank transfer
B) Cash
Though in Sweden the 2FA we tend to use is called BankId which is a standalone app only requiring an internet connection.
Oh, so how do you interface with your IP router for this?
8000kr = $63,40/€55,97
As for banks, it depends a lot on the country. While it's an issue for the homeless, it shouldn't be for people who're staying at some temporary accommodation. For instance in Germany, where most banks ask for proof of address (the registration at your municipality), it's also trivial get a valid document from whoever is hosting you (landlord or main tenant, it doesn't matter, you don't have to be on the lease).
Our major grocery store chains all still accept cash (ICA, Coop, Willys, Hemköp etc.) and at least ICA and Coop sells pretty much -everything- at their larger stores. They don't sell mattresses or furniture I guess, but you can go there with enough money and come out fully equipped to go camping for example. IKEA also accepts cash still, so you can buy your furniture there. Or even go get a nice meal there; a plate of meatballs and mashed potatoes costs 39 SEK (~3.7€, $4.1 USD). A BigMac&Co costs twice as much as a frame of reference.
I (a Swede) am able to use cash every single day, and it's not an effort to do so.
To get to IKEA and buy furniture you'll need to top up your SL card using card.
In rural ("rural" meaning an hour commute from Stockholm) you'll find it even harder to get and use cash.
It's trivial to both get and use cash here.
I was very impressed by Sydney's train between the airport and city that can take assorted contactless payments at the turnstile. None of this figuring out how many zones I need a ticket for or buying a $20 card and only using $9.50.
Why, other than your privacy? If I own a business, why should I be barred from choosing to not accept cash? Paper money is more labor-intensive to handle and opens my employees up to risk of being robbed for that cash or sickened by handling dirty bills.
As for people who may not be able to pay electronically, why can I not choose to not have them as customers?
If your argument is “because social good and we make those kinds of requirements on businesses all of the time,” I’m open to it but feel it goes much farther than privacy.
Businesses that don't accept cash don't make any money when the infrastructure fails. If your revenue is dependent on your PoS device, Wi-Fi, ISP, payment provider, the payment provider's network infrastructure, banking network, and more that's a lot of risk. For most independent businesses having a working cash register and a bank account that enables cash deposits would be a better option than the cost of SLAs and insurance against not being open.
In the UK embossed numbers on cards are gone now
Nope.
The only ones I know of which do not use embossed numbers are Starling Bank, and (for premier customers) RBS and NatWest. All bar one of my cards is embossed.
Supposedly as of January last year: "Lloyds, Barclays, Nationwide, HSBC and Santander all say they currently have no plans to introduce such cards."
So which ones are you thinking of where the embossed numbers have gone?
In times of unrest, "grey zone" conflict scenarios, cyberattacks....well you should have something to barter with.
For example, on Valentine's day a few million people couldn't pay electronically. That probably translated into a few million lost revenues for flower shops but I have no numbers. https://www.dn.se/ekonomi/swedbank-har-problem-swish-paverka...
Obviously not if the business is choosing to opt out of cash. I assume they are at least competent enough to know how often they have missed sales due to issues with electronic payments versus the cost of maintaining cash.
- it is low key discrimination of un/underbanked. imagine a "cashless utopia" where the only way you can buy groceries is by either:
* paying a "human usage fee" to use the cash line because businesses have axed labor down to the bone
* for those of the "efficiency" mindset, who just don't accept cash at all, the only way to get a credit or debit card is paying a bank a nice monthly fee. because, well, your credit score is bad. or something.
- it signals that as a business owner you're probably on the take on this whole hoovering up data and using it to your benefit without my consent or profit. you may know me as a loyal customer but i'd prefer to stay out of your MapReduce jobs by using cash, and i'd /especially/ prefer not to be sold or haggled over if you and other bakeries (or software shops) decide to hold church and compare lists to derive insight or other perverted data stuff, as credit cards and banks probably do today.
edit: here's a third - what's the environmental impact of having all this tech running (POS terminal, CC database, all the steps in between)? is it >> cash? i don't know the answer here, though.
another reason: when you pay in cash, your debt to the merchant is settled, right there. as a merchant accepting say a CC, if you fail to run an authorization check, you eat the cost. but what if the power runs out/comms down/servers overloaded/etc.? things get a lot hairier.
I mean, cash has to be physically transported, and in large enough volumes you'd need an armored vehicle, which I imagine has pretty poor energy efficiency.
Is that a thing? I used cash my entire life, I never heard of anyone becoming sick because of it.
Data security is my main issue. Companies have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to keep the data safe, so your private information, credit card details etc end up leaked and sold, your identity gets stolen, you have lots of trouble (financial and legal) and the company says "oopsie, keeping you safe is our top priority. Here's a $20 voucher you can spend at any of our shops".
As soon as any credit card transaction comes with a $5000 risk in damages & penalties if you've gotten your 5-year-old-never-updated-with-a-public-IP POS system cracked, the "labor-intensiveness" of paper money vanishes in comparison.
Why couldn't a virtual wallet with just a fake name and a password exists?
Just like Hugo Boss don't mention their Nazi Uniform Design Division in investor calls.
Governments. We didn't stop making lists after 45, in neither the FRG nor the GDR, the outcomes were just not as severe if you ended up on one of them.
The card PoS's come in two forms; one that only takes the Danish Dankort (which is the cheaper) and one that also accepts foreign cards.
Which is why merchants in Denmark - at least smaller ones - are still weary about upgrading to the fancy PoS, and therefore need to accept cash some times. Sure, there are alternatives to that, like MobilePay. But usually your problem will be with tourists, who don't have access to that, nor access to a Danish card, and can only pay cash. (Another good reason why governments won't abandon cash; they'd lose a lot of tourists too.)
I don't know whether PoS's are cheaper in Sweden than in Denmark, but generally speaking, Danes and Swedes have about the same level of trust in government, yet there are far more cash transactions in Denmark compared to Sweden.
And yes, there is Swish/MobilePay, but that only really works if you're local. A tourist - even one from a neighbouring country - will not have access to that.
There were iZettles in many Helsinki cafés a few years ago, but it seems to me that most of them have been replaced by normal PoS terminals.
Costs per transaction are higher but for really small scale the ease of use wins.
Source: Used to work as a technician fixing payment terminals.
Also, the Denmark-only Dankort is dying and its demise is happening fast: they are coupled as Dankort/Visa cards and the POS might decide to prefer Dankort but accepts Visa just as well. Neither Google Pay nor Fitbit Pay support Dankort and I have not seen transactions fail that would work with my Dankort.
Also, cash transactions are pretty rare too. Even older people use contactless, I have never seen cashiers have to pick coins from someone's hand as is customary with older people in Germany. Sometimes days pass without me seeing anyone pay with cash. In my experience the main source of cash transactions are German tourists.
Or at least the electronic payment systems we use need to be more robust. I remember from living in the Netherlands that they had a neat system called Chipknip. It was electronic money. So the machines accepting it did not rely on having a direct connection to a bank at all times.
It think if we are to be cashless we need something like that. It needs to be possible to make payments without having a physical connection to a bank at all times.
A big problem with electronic payment is that we are handing over a huge amount of cash to companies like VISA and Mastercard. I think when all of society operates in this fashion there really is a need for a government supported solution, because this is not merely a question of a "neat" feature you can buy but essential infrastructure in society.
It is reckless to leave such essential infrastructure in the hands of private companies.
but i push it even further: i'm for electronic cash, but i'm against some american company (visa, mastercard) to know every transaction of mine.
I want public electronic cash. A public, national, non for profit infrastructure that manage cash.
The reasoning is we don't want everything to break down just because the power grid or backbone networks breaks down.
We really need “digital cash”, ie a government backed digital currency that can be used with the convenience of cards but with the anonymity (at the point of sale) of cash.
I don’t believe in regular non-state cryptocurrencies for various reasons, not least because anonymity of all transactions isn’t really desirable in a high tax welfare state with high trust that people pay taxes.
The Swedish central back is working on it, so maybe this is not too far away. One should be aware though that “digital cash“ doesn’t solve all the problems, it’s not as resilient technically as paper cash.
People I know are trying to get pensioners they are 'responsible for' to stop carrying and using cash, as its far higher risk.
I don't personally know of anybody rebelling against the cashless society, not in any age group. Its not even talked about.
On the other hand, 'do you take swish' (a phone-to-phone payment method) is asked all the time. Lunch with friends? Instead of everyone ordering separately, just order together, and divvy it up with Swish when you get the bill. Etc.
I have a single banknote folded up my wallet, just for emergencies, and I haven't used it this year yet.
No one is, because the cashless society isn't happening. The concept of abandoning cash is at this stage merely a thought experiment. Even in Sweden, the most significant action taken in that direction is a discussion about whether to have a discussion, from the government.
But why would any government abandon cash? Any fiat currency needs at least some cash to go around, otherwise the remaining cash exchanges that still happens, a lot of which are untracked, would be outside of the control that governments still have over them; valuation. If you take away their cash, they will simply find another bartering tool.
But that won't work for shops trying to avoid taxes. It'll also make it much harder to buy stuff from criminals, as you would have to go get cash somewhere.
What other cash exchanges still happens?
Sure, their big ticket items are still going to be hotels and the like, where they will pay with a credit card, but they are not interested in coming if they can pay the small merchant with cash. Because they don't have access to the local infrastructure for digital payments, that the locals do.
I never travel abroad without cash, and that includes when I travel to Sweden.
I've been in Sweden plenty times and haven't even seen a single Swedish krona. In the Copenhagen subreddit we also recommend people not bringing in cash, at least as long as their credit card situation is somewhat reasonable.
Enter your phone number and the amount. Let others scan the dynamically generated QR code with their Swish app.
You can also link to payments for sharing. Phone numbers are encrypted in URL and there is no backend.
https://swisher.carlb.dev https://github.com/carlbarrdahl/swisher
The cost of switching to using cash is a trip to the bank/atm.
The closer you get to cashless the more you can afford to screw people to the wall.
For example does anyone recall the idea us bankers floated about negative nominal interest on checking?
Say, one lost a wallet and phone (robbed or just that, lost) and needs to get back home somehow. Public transportation requires an electronic ticket, cab needs card. What's then?
Walk to your bank branch, explain to driver the story and pay later, hope a compelled passenger would pay for you?
Lending someone a dollar does not oblige one whether you trust the person on not. Paying for one directly is more involved. Surely people don't lend their cards to strangers, willfully.
I would imagine one could just take a free ride, and prepare to tell the story if caught. Or maybe even go to police, report a loss, maybe get some means to get home.
Well, it's like a society contract. Looks like it has some small font on it too :)
This changes the notion of money, turning it more into rationning system. Cashless seems almost a step away from social credit system. You can get your "allocated share".
What does it mean to be a run-away in Sweden? Is it walk-away, hide-away, certainly not cashless...
Don't let it die until we have alternative suitable anonymous and un-blockable-by-cyberattacks (eg. "it must still work while the internet is down") currencies!
(Note: no, we don't have yet, all current crypto currencies are "barely working prototypes" at best, all of them have issues that still need ironing out! Bitcoin itself is like a proof-of-concept-pre-MVP that got "rushed into production". And the blockchain itself... we NEED to have a way of fully erasing history from it, like paper money do, we don't yet know how to do that while keeping the nice properties of blockchain... all these are open research questions, Satoshi only made the first baby step!)
"It is a common misconception that the so called 'Mark of the Beast' chip has anything to do with money. The Panda chip is nothing more than a pandemic health and contact tracing beacon."
"Because the chip is always available and very secure, a lot of the citizens do choose to use it for payments."
"We find the ideas surrounding cash obsolete. All cash is uniquely identifiable and most major stores just destroy received cash for sanitary reasons and print cash on demand for change."
"Regarding precious metal purchases, the Government does allow purchase, except gold which is required to manufacture the Panda chip and related accessories".
On the plus side the app StreetComplete has merged in a quest that allows people to easily answer whether a business in Sweden accepts cash or not.
So hopefully that will improve the poor OSM data set and allow people to easier find cash payment places.
For the nerds out there it uses the OSM tag payment:cash=yes.
One of the most inconvenient aspects about visiting China is paying for small things. Large department stores and high end restaurants will accept foreign credit cards, but mom and pop stores don’t.
While most still accept cash, sometimes the smaller stores or street vendors won’t have enough for change and you have to wait for them to get it. A few times I even got a discount when they couldn’t give me exact change.
I installed WeChat and AliPay last time I visited, but the payments don’t work if you don’t have a local number, ID, or bank account.
I attended a talk in the past("Know your enemy") when they defended and wanted to collect money and people for helping Colombia's FARC.
Those guys want to destroy democracy from democracy, just like Hitler, Mussolini or Chavez.
The last thing you want to do is give a Government like this all the information of all transactions made by the people in the country.
And that is exactly what "cash free" means. In countries like the US the mechanism of control of political power by people are more powerful, but even there companies control and concentration of information is too high(Americans distrust Government but trust companies) for a healthy system.
in the same manner, I gladly would have accepted mass surveillance if it meant the thief would actually get caught.
I think the deal is that the store, not the payment processor, eats the cost when a stolen card is used without a pin. But the increased turnover is probably worth it in many cases.
Edit: Maybe they also require a pin for foreign cards when they wouldn't for a local? Just a guess though.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to...
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...