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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Almost every transaction at a place like this will be with a card. I'm not even sure if most Swedes have enough cash on them to deal with with.

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Anecdata, but I live in Sweden and haven't touched cash in well over a year.

Anecdata 2, same in Denmark, I've lived here more than 5 years and have seen local cash maybe once.

I don’t even know which denominations our cash uses now. For example is there a 100 bill or was it replaced with the 200?

But as we see here it doesn’t matter whether I use cash since stores close when the systems go offline anyway. I doubt they’d even set up a cash fallback if this continues for months.

That is surprising, most Swedes have to use cash when they go to Spain for holidays. But, I guess that this pandemic year checks out. :)

Sweden uses Krona, Spain uses Euro. You might have a few Euro laying around for when you travel (most likely you just get some at the airport just before boarding to Spain), but in Sweden Euro is almost useless.

At least in Germany, cards also work offline if necessary.

So when there's an outage you can buy whatever you want? Or how do they verify that you have money?

I guess you're too young to remember when ALL transactions involved trust. Cheques didn't even have any kind of verification whatsoever, you just handed them out and the shops had to just hope they would clear... if they did not, the payee could obviously get into trouble with the law, but criminals still found creative ways to get away with it... watch the movie "Catch me if you can" to see one of the most entertaining abuses of cheques in history.

Once the transaction goes through your account at the bank (in case of debit) will be overdrawn and the bank will charge a penalty sum/interest as well as asking you to put funds in to get it back to a positive balance again.

Almost all Visa/Mastercard cards support this. It's actually better with chip cards since they're MCUs, capable of storing data including offline 'credit limits' and tabulating how much has been debited offline. Can verify pins offline too.

When you buy food/beer on a plane/train, this is probably happening. Ryanair would rather eat the cost of a fraudulent payment than pay for data and slow down their salespeople.

When I paid with a semi-broken machine recently, I actually had to sign a slip. I think the machine just read my IBAN as if the chip was a magnet strip. The offline credit limits are more of an optimization.

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