21 ms·

Sweden leads the race to become cashless society

32 points by eplanit 10y ago

bjornsing 10y ago
The busses have refused cash for years now, mostly for security reasons. But the other day one of my favorite cafés also declined the kingly payment method. A good sign indeed. :) A perhaps even better one is that one of the lunch places I go to no-longer requires my pin code when I pay by card. :D Progress! :)
- ginko 10y ago
  This sounds horrifying.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    How long before health insurance companies are able to track your diet or habits and adjust your premiums accordingly. I'm picturing a text message from the insurance company that tells me I've gone over my donut allowance for the month.
    - mike-cardwell 10y ago
      "health insurance company" - What sort of backwards society is this?
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  So not only can you not get on a bus without your movements being logged in a commercial database, but now you can't even buy a coffee without that happening too. And you call that "progress" ?
- ams6110 10y ago
  TBH buses in most places haven't accepted cash on board in quite some time. You have to buy tokens or a bus pass and use those. Even tokens I think are not much used any more because in bulk they are heavy and expensive to transport and account for.
- miend 10y ago
  It sounds downright Orwellian. The government, its banks, payment processors all having the ability to instantly lock you out of the economy and watch your every transaction, leaving you totally out of options should you get on their bad side? That just sounds like another building block in the surveillance Panopticon, psychological assurance that you'll never become dissentious because your continued existence in the economy essentially depends upon the state's grace. It changes the way people act, and even the way they think. It's the disturbing new reality that Snowden, Greenwald, et al. have sought to do something about, and here Swedes seem to be embracing it openly. It sure sounds like this service could offer some great conveniences to daily living, but is it worth such a heavy price? The erosion of the will to dissent, and the power of the individual over their own lives? Are these an acceptable trade for the comfort of never having to see a coin again?
  - bjornsing 10y ago
    > The erosion of the will to dissent, and the power of the individual over their own lives We Swedes are way past that. We live as humble subjects of our government, cuddled from cradle to grave, bowing to their authority much as we once bowed to the king. :P But every four years the people is abolished and the government choses a new one, so it's still a democracy! ;P
    - bjornsing 10y ago
      I'm only half joking here, and I'm definitely not saying you're wrong. Just trying to explain why we Swedes probably don't think about the cashless society in the same way as americans do. And by the way, most of my friends would probably describe me as "a borderline libertarian" (by Swedish standards), "fixated" on individual liberties and similar.
skocznymroczny 10y ago
Which is pretty much proportional to the adoption of negative interest rates, which wouldn't really be possible on such scale without eliminating physical cash.
superkuh 10y ago
In a cashless society all transactions are controlled and monitored by third parties. There is no potential for individual volition except at the whim of those controlling the systems. Cryptocurrencies will mitigate this slightly but the loss of cash is going to be a huge blow to the individual.
- andres_kytt 10y ago
  I find this approach really curious. All the transactions can be monitored by third parties anyway as all the pos systems are networked and subject to even lesser legal scrutiny than banks. Random adverisers can and do build comprehensive profiles. A company is us claims to have full profiles of all Americans. And yet, if there's a chance a citizen might benefit either via less hassle as in the cash case or via better gov services, everybody goes "but think of the privacy". As a result, societies get downsides of both: there is no privacy whatsoever but no value generated for the citizen.
  - mrec 10y ago
    I think GP's point re cash was just that cash transactions are typically anonymous. Obviously you can get around that by e.g. matching up till receipts against video surveillance and facial recognition tech, but I'm not aware that that happens routinely, so in practice you probably have a fair degree of privacy.
    - andres_kytt 10y ago
      Cash transactions are anonymous only if most transactions are cash. I take x eur from the bank and give them to you. You put x eur to the bank. That's linkable. And the people sign up to all sorts of savings cards en masse making their transactions at the till completely traceable. It is not about what happens routinely, it is about what can happen. Banks don't give a damn about your transaction history as long as you account balance adds up and neither does the government. With cash, there is an illusion of anonymity. Without cash you actually know what happens.
dijit 10y ago
Ehhhhhh I think Britain is closer. Contactless payment methods are significantly more common in London. (In fact you'd be hard pressed to say a business which doesn't accept contactless /and/ Apple Pay) I live in Sweden and there are places that won't take VISA- and banks only give out mastercards which cost the consumer monthly. Not to mention the fact that contactless and Apple Pay are nowhere to be found. Maybe it's different in Stockholm but in Malmö you can definitely see a negative disparity when compared to Britain.
- K0nserv 10y ago
  I moved from Stockholm to Edinburgh about a year ago and I definitely use cash a lot more here. Sure contactless is more widespread, but a lot of places don't accept cards or have a minimum spend amount for card transactions. When I lived in Stockholm I believe I went 6 months without handling any cash, here I can barely last a day without it.
  - sandstrom 10y ago
    Same, I cannot remember when I used cash the last time, but I think it's more than 9 months ago.
- eropple 10y ago
  I can't speak to Sweden, but I don't think that London is really representative of the rest of the UK. It might be a case where the average lags behind the leader?
- mrec 10y ago
  There's a big difference between "accepts contactless" and "cashless", though. I live in London and still use cash exclusively for in-person transactions, and I've never had a problem. I think London is just unusually accommodating when it comes to taking people's money. Quite a few of the big shops in Oxford Street accept paper Euros, which doesn't really fit the "going cashless" narrative.
stenl 10y ago
I live in Stockholm and haven't used cash for several years. I have no cash on me ever, no coins, nothing. It's liberating. I get very annoyed when travelling and I rediscover the cash-based society and the need to always predict how much cash to carry.
- Numberwang 10y ago
  Agreed, I moved from Stockholm to London a few years ago and in this regard in particular it felt like stepping back in time. I now end up putting all the smaller coins in the bin just to get rid of them.
- sebcat 10y ago
  I stood in line at a grocery store recently where the POS terminal failed and they started letting through people who could pay in cash. When they announced that, a hipster-looking guy in front of me commented "who uses cash in 2016?" or similar, to which my silent answer was to pass him and pay for my groceries w/ cash. Doesn't happen very often though.
- driverdan 10y ago
  I find the opposite is true, that cash is liberating. 1. I always know how much cash in in my pocket. I typically carry $30-50 which is plenty for everyday transactions. 2. It's easy to budget with cash. You can never spend more than what you have. 3. I don't have to worry about paying off card balances. 4. The chances of getting a credit / debit card stolen are a lot higher than having my cash stolen, eliminating the hassle of replacing cards. 5. I support my community by eliminating the overhead of accepting cards. 6. I can easily pay individuals instantly without having to worry about what service to use or delays in transferring from my bank to theirs. 7. I maintain my privacy. I'm not even considering the downsides of using a phone for payments (lost / stolen / broken / dead battery / borked update / bad UIs). All that said I use a mix of cash and cards. Cards do have a lot of consumer advantages (cash back, disputing transactions, etc). Don't pretend that they're far superior to cash though. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. The loss of privacy is a HUGE problem with electronic payments.
  - 10y ago
marssaxman 10y ago
Why on earth is this considered a good thing? Haven't we learned anything about mass surveillance in the last five years?
- atlih 10y ago
  That's something to be worried about. But I'm more worried about banks having the power to issue unlimited currency which is a default in a cashless society
  - mrec 10y ago
    Well, cash hasn't exactly stopped them either. I don't know what the figures are elsewhere, but in the UK around 97% of money is created by private banks making loans, not by the central bank printing notes.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - polotics 10y ago
      Oh please learn some economics. Bank loans are not new money. Some TBTF banks have a problem of under-capitalization and may be bailed out with new money, but banks are government's strawmen on this racket.
      - atlih 10y ago
        Bank loans are new money according to The Bank of England http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte... The reason banks get into trouble is because they cannot meet even their tiniest obligations in actual currency. In a cashless society this will not be a problem, just unlimited digital money creation.
- fpoling 10y ago
  I do not worry about mass surveillance that much. With all the cameras anonymity of cache quickly disappears in any case. What really bad is when a police or any arbitrary guy representing a state can order to freeze all the cards and bank accounts for an individual. This is already happening in Russia and is used not only against political activists but sometime against arbitrary persons through police bribes by their enemies. If a person does not have savings in cash, he or she may loose access to all his money in a moment and it takes often weeks to fight those illegal freezing orders. One can literally starve while doing that.
fpoling 10y ago
In Norway I know only a single shop that still does not accept cards, perhaps on principle. Even farmers selling fruits and vegetables often have a card reader. However many shops accept only cards from Norway that are connected to the BankAccept system which are significantly cheaper for a shop to accept than credit cards. Also as a sign of times street musicians sometimes write their phone number for Vipps, a local payment system that allows to send money just by knowing a phone number. Still the country is far from cachless judging by the number of professional beggars in big cities. Somehow they make a living so people still curry coins.
- RivieraKid 10y ago
  Wow, that's interesting, I'm a big fan of card payments because tap to pay is super convenient (most places in Prague have card readers) but what annoys me is the Visa / MasterCard duopoly. Because this means that a fraction of every payment goes to an American company - it's not a competetive market so they have a sizeable profit margin. It's cool that you have a local alternative, I wish we had that too or at least more than 2 competitors to push profits down, so that card payments don't leak money out of the economy.
  - fpoling 10y ago
    There is still a problem as shops do not pass savings from using a local payment system to the customer. As some banks started to offer cash-back cards that return up to 1% of payments back, as a customer I have more insensitive to use cache-back credit card than a local one.
towb 10y ago
As I see it, this has the potential of being a disaster for certain groups of people in the society. Old and poor. And there are no free solutions, you have to spend to spend. The old paypal tax but on every purchase you do. There are problems with this that has to be solved before it's implemented but aren't yet there for the early adopters, which may then leave too many people behind. These are some of my concerns, but what do I know...
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Yep, in a cashless society, everything is 3% more expensive.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    That's not really true. The average fee in Sweden is closer to 1% than 3%, and handling cash is really expensive. Realistically a cashless society should save money.
    - lukeschlather 10y ago
      Margins matter. Somebody who makes $100k maybe spends $60k/year and doesn't care that they pay $600 for transaction fees. Somebody who makes $30k spends $28k/year and $280 in transaction fees has a huge effect on net savings.
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      Well yes, it saves people time (and time is money), but it's a trade off and sometimes ends up costing more than it saves. If your kid wants to buy something, normally you just give them cash and they can't spend anything more. If you give them your card, now they can spend as much as they want ($1000 on Clash of Clans for example). While there are solutions such as giving your kid their own card you transfer the money to, it's a lot more effort than just pulling out a $5, and I'm sure many parents would forgo that route and just hand the kid their card. What do you do when you want to buy something anonymously? Normally, you'd just pay with cash. Want to donate to Wikileaks without anyone knowing? Use a money order. In a cashless society, you can't do it as simple as that. You need to purchase prepaid debit cards (which costs time). And if the prepaids can be linked with the purchaser, then you'd need to spend even more time buying bitcoins, tossing them in a tumbler, then buying prepaid debit cards. A lot of extra work compared to just using cash or money order. So yes, a cashless saves time, but it also costs time in other areas. Has Sweden found a balance? Doubt it.
sheraz 10y ago
House of cards. Cashless societies mean: the unbanked are further isolated and prevented from engaging in commerce. Older generations are left behind. Just trying to switch bankid login from old phone to new phone is a PITA, and I'm tech savvy. Lack of anonymous transactions means that my banks know about my vices such as gambling, porn, or strippers. Cascading failures - payment network crashes means no one can authorize traction means long lines at registers. Everywhere. Just lending money to someone requires a smartphones and apps (swish in Sweden) and bankid (see above) Battery dead on phone? Sorry, I can't loan you 500kr. (You can still receive on dead battery). Now, I will be the first to admit that when all the boxes are checked it works pretty well. Swish is amazing. However, what concerns me is the blind faith people have in this huge tech stack. There is so much that goes into facilitating the purchase of a candy bar from a vending machine. It is an all or nothing scenario. Either it works 100% or you can't use the chip in your card in the terminal to connect to the network to the bank to verify funds available to authorize purchase of said candy bar. Thankfully there is still cash which in my opinion really greases the wheels of everyday commerce.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  This is a good point that cashless means having a smart phone and a bank account which marginalizes the already marginalized such as the homeless. I realize that Sweden doesn't have that problem but there are many other places that do. Also anyone that's lived through a hurricane or a blackout tell you cash is king. Having a few days worth stashed is a good addition to any preparedness kit.
  - sheraz 10y ago
    In Sweden there are the Roma/gypsy population who have smartphones but certainly don't have Swedish bank accounts. This is also true for many expats. Including other Scandinavian nationals. Americans have an especially tough time finding a bank to open an account due to FBAR and FACTA, treaties signed to combat money laundering and such. The result is that many bank branches choose to not offer accounts due to the added paperwork. No bank account. No bankid. Often fewer services available to you. Note: this is a common criticism for foreign nationals starting up a life in Sweden.
kristofferR 10y ago
How am I, for example, supposed to pay my Swedish festival buddies for small stuff like a meal or a few beers if cash is banned? Swish, the popular person-to-person payment app in Sweden, only work for Swedes.
brainpool 10y ago
I live in Sweden and have not visited an ATM for months. Even public toilets have a card reader attached. I would like to have a way to easily display the balance of the card though, or just the last few expenses, preferably on the card it self.
- CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
  Not affiliated, by I liked this https://plastc.com/ https://plastc.com/
swiley 10y ago
I would understand the excitement for this if there where some fairly decentralized payment protocol so any single third party would not have the final say in wether or not you could buy/sell something and/or those rights where protected by law, but neither of those are true.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
What happens when power grids fail, or if war ever breaks out in Europe and internet banking fails as a result? --- At least with cash you can still get the staples at the store.
- CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
  I guess what would happen is that people will invent new cash as needed. Cigarettes being the classic example.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
The local public service news did a piece on this a while ago and the biggest problem they could envisage was the usability problems. Which is kind of sad, I'm sure most usability issues can be solved one way or the other. Heres one thing that really should have more focus, remember when visa and mastercard decided to kill allofmp3? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/allofmp3_attacks_visa_and_mastercard/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/allofmp3_attacks_vis...
polotics 10y ago
This is obviously all wonderfully modern and the wave of the future and all that. Yeah Sweden!!! Totally lagom :-) What the article fails to mention is that the swedish central bank has been able to implement an extremely aggressive negative interest rates policy thanks to The Cashless. So if you like your savings eaten away by government mandated fiat (see what I just did there?) then of course be all plasticky and virtual. This ends in hyperinflation as well as taxation cat-and-mouse games between governments and alternative currencies.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jakeogh 10y ago
An important goal along the way to chipping the subjects.

32 points by eplanit 10y ago

The busses have refused cash for years now, mostly for security reasons. But the other day one of my favorite cafés also declined the kingly payment method. A good sign indeed. :) A perhaps even better one is that one of the lunch places I go to no-longer requires my pin code when I pay by card. :D Progress! :)

ginko 10y ago
This sounds horrifying.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  How long before health insurance companies are able to track your diet or habits and adjust your premiums accordingly. I'm picturing a text message from the insurance company that tells me I've gone over my donut allowance for the month.
  - mike-cardwell 10y ago
    "health insurance company" - What sort of backwards society is this?
mike-cardwell 10y ago
So not only can you not get on a bus without your movements being logged in a commercial database, but now you can't even buy a coffee without that happening too. And you call that "progress" ?
ams6110 10y ago
TBH buses in most places haven't accepted cash on board in quite some time. You have to buy tokens or a bus pass and use those. Even tokens I think are not much used any more because in bulk they are heavy and expensive to transport and account for.
miend 10y ago
It sounds downright Orwellian. The government, its banks, payment processors all having the ability to instantly lock you out of the economy and watch your every transaction, leaving you totally out of options should you get on their bad side? That just sounds like another building block in the surveillance Panopticon, psychological assurance that you'll never become dissentious because your continued existence in the economy essentially depends upon the state's grace. It changes the way people act, and even the way they think. It's the disturbing new reality that Snowden, Greenwald, et al. have sought to do something about, and here Swedes seem to be embracing it openly. It sure sounds like this service could offer some great conveniences to daily living, but is it worth such a heavy price? The erosion of the will to dissent, and the power of the individual over their own lives? Are these an acceptable trade for the comfort of never having to see a coin again?
- bjornsing 10y ago
  > The erosion of the will to dissent, and the power of the individual over their own lives We Swedes are way past that. We live as humble subjects of our government, cuddled from cradle to grave, bowing to their authority much as we once bowed to the king. :P But every four years the people is abolished and the government choses a new one, so it's still a democracy! ;P
  - bjornsing 10y ago
    I'm only half joking here, and I'm definitely not saying you're wrong. Just trying to explain why we Swedes probably don't think about the cashless society in the same way as americans do. And by the way, most of my friends would probably describe me as "a borderline libertarian" (by Swedish standards), "fixated" on individual liberties and similar.

skocznymroczny 10y ago

Which is pretty much proportional to the adoption of negative interest rates, which wouldn't really be possible on such scale without eliminating physical cash.

superkuh 10y ago

In a cashless society all transactions are controlled and monitored by third parties. There is no potential for individual volition except at the whim of those controlling the systems. Cryptocurrencies will mitigate this slightly but the loss of cash is going to be a huge blow to the individual.

andres_kytt 10y ago
I find this approach really curious. All the transactions can be monitored by third parties anyway as all the pos systems are networked and subject to even lesser legal scrutiny than banks. Random adverisers can and do build comprehensive profiles. A company is us claims to have full profiles of all Americans. And yet, if there's a chance a citizen might benefit either via less hassle as in the cash case or via better gov services, everybody goes "but think of the privacy". As a result, societies get downsides of both: there is no privacy whatsoever but no value generated for the citizen.
- mrec 10y ago
  I think GP's point re cash was just that cash transactions are typically anonymous. Obviously you can get around that by e.g. matching up till receipts against video surveillance and facial recognition tech, but I'm not aware that that happens routinely, so in practice you probably have a fair degree of privacy.
  - andres_kytt 10y ago
    Cash transactions are anonymous only if most transactions are cash. I take x eur from the bank and give them to you. You put x eur to the bank. That's linkable. And the people sign up to all sorts of savings cards en masse making their transactions at the till completely traceable. It is not about what happens routinely, it is about what can happen. Banks don't give a damn about your transaction history as long as you account balance adds up and neither does the government. With cash, there is an illusion of anonymity. Without cash you actually know what happens.

dijit 10y ago

Ehhhhhh I think Britain is closer. Contactless payment methods are significantly more common in London. (In fact you'd be hard pressed to say a business which doesn't accept contactless /and/ Apple Pay) I live in Sweden and there are places that won't take VISA- and banks only give out mastercards which cost the consumer monthly. Not to mention the fact that contactless and Apple Pay are nowhere to be found. Maybe it's different in Stockholm but in Malmö you can definitely see a negative disparity when compared to Britain.

K0nserv 10y ago
I moved from Stockholm to Edinburgh about a year ago and I definitely use cash a lot more here. Sure contactless is more widespread, but a lot of places don't accept cards or have a minimum spend amount for card transactions. When I lived in Stockholm I believe I went 6 months without handling any cash, here I can barely last a day without it.
- sandstrom 10y ago
  Same, I cannot remember when I used cash the last time, but I think it's more than 9 months ago.
eropple 10y ago
I can't speak to Sweden, but I don't think that London is really representative of the rest of the UK. It might be a case where the average lags behind the leader?
mrec 10y ago
There's a big difference between "accepts contactless" and "cashless", though. I live in London and still use cash exclusively for in-person transactions, and I've never had a problem. I think London is just unusually accommodating when it comes to taking people's money. Quite a few of the big shops in Oxford Street accept paper Euros, which doesn't really fit the "going cashless" narrative.

stenl 10y ago

I live in Stockholm and haven't used cash for several years. I have no cash on me ever, no coins, nothing. It's liberating. I get very annoyed when travelling and I rediscover the cash-based society and the need to always predict how much cash to carry.

Numberwang 10y ago
Agreed, I moved from Stockholm to London a few years ago and in this regard in particular it felt like stepping back in time. I now end up putting all the smaller coins in the bin just to get rid of them.
sebcat 10y ago
I stood in line at a grocery store recently where the POS terminal failed and they started letting through people who could pay in cash. When they announced that, a hipster-looking guy in front of me commented "who uses cash in 2016?" or similar, to which my silent answer was to pass him and pay for my groceries w/ cash. Doesn't happen very often though.
driverdan 10y ago
I find the opposite is true, that cash is liberating. 1. I always know how much cash in in my pocket. I typically carry $30-50 which is plenty for everyday transactions. 2. It's easy to budget with cash. You can never spend more than what you have. 3. I don't have to worry about paying off card balances. 4. The chances of getting a credit / debit card stolen are a lot higher than having my cash stolen, eliminating the hassle of replacing cards. 5. I support my community by eliminating the overhead of accepting cards. 6. I can easily pay individuals instantly without having to worry about what service to use or delays in transferring from my bank to theirs. 7. I maintain my privacy. I'm not even considering the downsides of using a phone for payments (lost / stolen / broken / dead battery / borked update / bad UIs). All that said I use a mix of cash and cards. Cards do have a lot of consumer advantages (cash back, disputing transactions, etc). Don't pretend that they're far superior to cash though. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. The loss of privacy is a HUGE problem with electronic payments.
- 10y ago

marssaxman 10y ago

Why on earth is this considered a good thing? Haven't we learned anything about mass surveillance in the last five years?

atlih 10y ago
That's something to be worried about. But I'm more worried about banks having the power to issue unlimited currency which is a default in a cashless society
- mrec 10y ago
  Well, cash hasn't exactly stopped them either. I don't know what the figures are elsewhere, but in the UK around 97% of money is created by private banks making loans, not by the central bank printing notes.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - polotics 10y ago
    Oh please learn some economics. Bank loans are not new money. Some TBTF banks have a problem of under-capitalization and may be bailed out with new money, but banks are government's strawmen on this racket.
    - atlih 10y ago
      Bank loans are new money according to The Bank of England http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte... The reason banks get into trouble is because they cannot meet even their tiniest obligations in actual currency. In a cashless society this will not be a problem, just unlimited digital money creation.
fpoling 10y ago
I do not worry about mass surveillance that much. With all the cameras anonymity of cache quickly disappears in any case. What really bad is when a police or any arbitrary guy representing a state can order to freeze all the cards and bank accounts for an individual. This is already happening in Russia and is used not only against political activists but sometime against arbitrary persons through police bribes by their enemies. If a person does not have savings in cash, he or she may loose access to all his money in a moment and it takes often weeks to fight those illegal freezing orders. One can literally starve while doing that.

fpoling 10y ago

In Norway I know only a single shop that still does not accept cards, perhaps on principle. Even farmers selling fruits and vegetables often have a card reader. However many shops accept only cards from Norway that are connected to the BankAccept system which are significantly cheaper for a shop to accept than credit cards. Also as a sign of times street musicians sometimes write their phone number for Vipps, a local payment system that allows to send money just by knowing a phone number. Still the country is far from cachless judging by the number of professional beggars in big cities. Somehow they make a living so people still curry coins.

RivieraKid 10y ago
Wow, that's interesting, I'm a big fan of card payments because tap to pay is super convenient (most places in Prague have card readers) but what annoys me is the Visa / MasterCard duopoly. Because this means that a fraction of every payment goes to an American company - it's not a competetive market so they have a sizeable profit margin. It's cool that you have a local alternative, I wish we had that too or at least more than 2 competitors to push profits down, so that card payments don't leak money out of the economy.
- fpoling 10y ago
  There is still a problem as shops do not pass savings from using a local payment system to the customer. As some banks started to offer cash-back cards that return up to 1% of payments back, as a customer I have more insensitive to use cache-back credit card than a local one.

towb 10y ago

As I see it, this has the potential of being a disaster for certain groups of people in the society. Old and poor. And there are no free solutions, you have to spend to spend. The old paypal tax but on every purchase you do. There are problems with this that has to be solved before it's implemented but aren't yet there for the early adopters, which may then leave too many people behind. These are some of my concerns, but what do I know...

StavrosK 10y ago
Yep, in a cashless society, everything is 3% more expensive.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  That's not really true. The average fee in Sweden is closer to 1% than 3%, and handling cash is really expensive. Realistically a cashless society should save money.
  - lukeschlather 10y ago
    Margins matter. Somebody who makes $100k maybe spends $60k/year and doesn't care that they pay $600 for transaction fees. Somebody who makes $30k spends $28k/year and $280 in transaction fees has a huge effect on net savings.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    Well yes, it saves people time (and time is money), but it's a trade off and sometimes ends up costing more than it saves. If your kid wants to buy something, normally you just give them cash and they can't spend anything more. If you give them your card, now they can spend as much as they want ($1000 on Clash of Clans for example). While there are solutions such as giving your kid their own card you transfer the money to, it's a lot more effort than just pulling out a $5, and I'm sure many parents would forgo that route and just hand the kid their card. What do you do when you want to buy something anonymously? Normally, you'd just pay with cash. Want to donate to Wikileaks without anyone knowing? Use a money order. In a cashless society, you can't do it as simple as that. You need to purchase prepaid debit cards (which costs time). And if the prepaids can be linked with the purchaser, then you'd need to spend even more time buying bitcoins, tossing them in a tumbler, then buying prepaid debit cards. A lot of extra work compared to just using cash or money order. So yes, a cashless saves time, but it also costs time in other areas. Has Sweden found a balance? Doubt it.

sheraz 10y ago

House of cards. Cashless societies mean: the unbanked are further isolated and prevented from engaging in commerce. Older generations are left behind. Just trying to switch bankid login from old phone to new phone is a PITA, and I'm tech savvy. Lack of anonymous transactions means that my banks know about my vices such as gambling, porn, or strippers. Cascading failures - payment network crashes means no one can authorize traction means long lines at registers. Everywhere. Just lending money to someone requires a smartphones and apps (swish in Sweden) and bankid (see above) Battery dead on phone? Sorry, I can't loan you 500kr. (You can still receive on dead battery). Now, I will be the first to admit that when all the boxes are checked it works pretty well. Swish is amazing. However, what concerns me is the blind faith people have in this huge tech stack. There is so much that goes into facilitating the purchase of a candy bar from a vending machine. It is an all or nothing scenario. Either it works 100% or you can't use the chip in your card in the terminal to connect to the network to the bank to verify funds available to authorize purchase of said candy bar. Thankfully there is still cash which in my opinion really greases the wheels of everyday commerce.

bogomipz 10y ago
This is a good point that cashless means having a smart phone and a bank account which marginalizes the already marginalized such as the homeless. I realize that Sweden doesn't have that problem but there are many other places that do. Also anyone that's lived through a hurricane or a blackout tell you cash is king. Having a few days worth stashed is a good addition to any preparedness kit.
- sheraz 10y ago
  In Sweden there are the Roma/gypsy population who have smartphones but certainly don't have Swedish bank accounts. This is also true for many expats. Including other Scandinavian nationals. Americans have an especially tough time finding a bank to open an account due to FBAR and FACTA, treaties signed to combat money laundering and such. The result is that many bank branches choose to not offer accounts due to the added paperwork. No bank account. No bankid. Often fewer services available to you. Note: this is a common criticism for foreign nationals starting up a life in Sweden.

kristofferR 10y ago

How am I, for example, supposed to pay my Swedish festival buddies for small stuff like a meal or a few beers if cash is banned? Swish, the popular person-to-person payment app in Sweden, only work for Swedes.

brainpool 10y ago

I live in Sweden and have not visited an ATM for months. Even public toilets have a card reader attached. I would like to have a way to easily display the balance of the card though, or just the last few expenses, preferably on the card it self.

CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
Not affiliated, by I liked this https://plastc.com/ https://plastc.com/

swiley 10y ago

I would understand the excitement for this if there where some fairly decentralized payment protocol so any single third party would not have the final say in wether or not you could buy/sell something and/or those rights where protected by law, but neither of those are true.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

What happens when power grids fail, or if war ever breaks out in Europe and internet banking fails as a result? --- At least with cash you can still get the staples at the store.

CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
I guess what would happen is that people will invent new cash as needed. Cigarettes being the classic example.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

CuriousSkeptic 10y ago

The local public service news did a piece on this a while ago and the biggest problem they could envisage was the usability problems. Which is kind of sad, I'm sure most usability issues can be solved one way or the other. Heres one thing that really should have more focus, remember when visa and mastercard decided to kill allofmp3? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/allofmp3_attacks_visa_and_mastercard/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/allofmp3_attacks_vis...

polotics 10y ago

This is obviously all wonderfully modern and the wave of the future and all that. Yeah Sweden!!! Totally lagom :-) What the article fails to mention is that the swedish central bank has been able to implement an extremely aggressive negative interest rates policy thanks to The Cashless. So if you like your savings eaten away by government mandated fiat (see what I just did there?) then of course be all plasticky and virtual. This ends in hyperinflation as well as taxation cat-and-mouse games between governments and alternative currencies.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jakeogh 10y ago

An important goal along the way to chipping the subjects.