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Good. The cashless drive gives me the creeps. 1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending. 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto

Good. The cashless drive gives me the creeps. 1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending. 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto an oligopoly. Cashless gives this system a 2% tax on all spending (+ fraud, which retailers pay for). 3 - Government control is creepy too. Liberty reasons, privacy reasons, single-point-of failure reasons. Just simple competency reasons. 4 - It advantages big firms relative to small ones who pay lower fees for better service, and continues the trend to bigger firms. How does a cashless lemonade stand work? Most transactions already are cashless, and all the rules around these are run by the banking-regulator-government complex. They wield tremendous control, and decide a lot about how businesses should run. Remember paypal confiscating aid money, kickstarters and such... to be released gradually and when paypal was convinced that it should be? They basically decide which transactions should happen. This does not work on an innocent-until-guilty basis. We've had a lot of financial regulation recently, bleeding way past the financial sectors. AML or whatnot. The lawyers love it because it's lawyerly, and demands lawyers. Governments love it because it because it makes everything auditable, in theory. Tax evasion, funding terrorism, buying grass become impossible. The big financial firms (especially CCs) love it because it entrenches their oligopolies. Big regular firm love it because they are good at bureaucracy and incumbents are not. The bitcoin failure (I think it is) teaches something. People don't really give each other money. It's kind of illegal. Money is supposed to move between people and companies or companies and companies, not between people. There is no demand for Peter-pays-Paul. I don't see any upside at all for, dare I say... we the people.

sitharus 9y ago
Cashless transactions don’t have to go through the card networks. Here in New Zealand around 2/3rds of all retail transactions are done via cards because many years ago the reserve bank mandated free inter-bank transactions. This means direct bank-to-bank transactions via the local EFTPOS network are free for both parties (with exceptions for some low-use plans, and businesses typically rent the terminals). Also the local eBay equivalent TradeMe gained its popularity on this network. Given somebody’s bank account number I can transfer money to their account within an hour (used to be overnight until a few years ago). There’s no reversal for this so it’s safe for the seller, and since it’s a real bank there’s no way to freeze it without a court order. The banks being banks of course are trying to ruin this, since using the big card networks gives them free revenue.
- __alias 9y ago
  blows my mind that people overseas still use cash. Literally the only reason I ever get cash out is to buy weed
  - sitharus 9y ago
    It depends a lot on where you go. Both Australia and Canada are easy to go through cashless, except for small stores due to the card fees. I don’t know about Canada but Australia has capped the card fees so debit cards are more popular than in NZ. Still you don’t really see the vendors at small farmer’s markets with the payclip things like you do in NZ.
  - alxndr 9y ago
    And now the cannabis shops in California take credit cards!
- mcv 9y ago
  There are only 4 things that I still pay with cash: my cleaner, my cheese shop (who refuses to get a pin machine, the luddite), my son's allowance, and money for street performers and beggars. The only thing for which I use credit cards are online purchases from foreign websites that don't support iDeal. Everything else is through regular bank transactions, either through pin card, direct transactions, or iDeal. All Dutch banks support iDeal, and I wish the rest of the world would too because it's vastly superior to credit cards.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    Can you share the reasons why it's vastly superior to credit cards? Using my card, I get good post-purchase protection (via threat of chargeback or card issuer-provided warranty increase) and excellent fraud protection.
    - mcv 9y ago
      It's cheaper. More importantly, it's more secure, because it uses my bank's security system and doesn't rely on sending "secret" information like credit card numbers to unknown parties. Everything is handled by my own bank, and if I don't trust my own bank, I can choose a better bank and use that. With credit cards, I have to use whatever payment provider the merchant uses, and either they or the merchant can hang on to my credit card number, which weirdly is sufficient to access my money. Also, there are only two credit card providers that really count; not a lot of choice there. Chargebacks may seem attractive as a buyer, but they also mean that a seller can lose their money after they legitimately sent the goods. Merchants would have to track down individual customers to sue them to get their money back.
supreme_sublime 9y ago
With the amount of political pressure I've seen recently to cut off people from their income (advertiser boycotts, contacting employers directly, etc) I've wondered about money transfers and if people will start going after those companies next. What recourse do you have if banks refuse to take your money? If credit card companies refuse to give you a line of credit? I don't know much about that level of infrastructure but it definitely seems ripe for abuse in this way. I don't know what laws govern this and it concerns me how the current system is set up that through activist pressure that people might not be able to sustain themselves for opinions that are declared outside the Overton window.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  There are a number of options for people who have to or need to go bankless. Look around in any poor/immigrant neighborhood and you'll see ads for "currency exchanges" that act like banks, pre-paid charge cards, and companies willing to give all kinds of loans as long as they can verify employment or hold your car title. It's not ideal, and it's very easy to get ripped off, but it's possible to live that way. Millions of people do.
mindslight 9y ago
I agree with the entirety of your comment, except for your specific points 1 and 2. Post facto, having spent cash gives you less insight into what it was spent on (unless you want to diligently duplicate the recording of a credit card with your own private ledger). And it's often cited that businesses accepting cash have real costs for doing so, which I tend to believe (armored cars, etc).
- dalbasal 9y ago
  My point 1 was about me. I like using cash. Point 2 is.. I think your reasoning about cash costs relates to point 4. These kinds of costs are something that big, high turnover businesses are concerned with. I don't think a tiny, rural cafe cares too much that €190 of its €780 daily take is cash.
skrause 9y ago
> 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto an oligopoly. Cashless gives this system a 2% tax on all spending (+ fraud, which retailers pay for). Not in the European Union where this fee is capped to 0,3%.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  When it's free in the EU, then you'll have a point. Until then you're not addressing his argument.
  - germanier 9y ago
    The fee is a bit higher than 0.3% (which only is the regulated interchange – there are a few other costs as well) but the rate was decided upon after evaluating the cost of cash transactions (which aren't actually free – consider insurance against robbery, time spent counting every evening, transport to the bank, bank fees, and similar).
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    But surely the effective "tax" of moving cash around, losing it, practically unusably small amounts of change etc. is greater than 0.3% for the vast majority of use cases.
  - skrause 9y ago
    I wasn't addressing his argument because I actually agree. I was just pointing out that the 2% is far off in Europe.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      OP... I was simplifying. I don't know the real number for the economy as a whole, but the experience I do have (mostly in the higher risk/cost "card-not-present" scenarios) actual transaction costs are always higher than they seem at first glance. For example, retailers bear the majority of fraud risk. Add that in, and the cost of anti-fraud.. it adds up. Then there's the consumer side, where users "pay" fees, pay interest rates.. My point is that all these digital payment (including the paper-originally CCs) tend to become bottlenecks and oligopolies. Banks, CCs, gateways.. all tend to centralisation, regulation and low competition. All the ingredients for price inflation.
reaperducer 9y ago
> How does a cashless lemonade stand work? In my neighborhood, with Square. Or at least that's how the kids a couple of streets over did it last year. With great big cartoony Visa and MasterCard logos on posterboard.
- monocasa 9y ago
  And I've heard of beggars with WeChat QR codes in China.
agsamek 9y ago
In Poland (EU) we have BLIK system which allows for up to $1000 instant transfer for a phone number. Free of additional charge. We pay with cards with paypass wirelessly without PIN for small amounts. This is faster than cash. I recently stopped carrying coins and avoid paying cash. And bank transfers are free in most banks. It takes half a day at most to reach destination bank.
rhacker 9y ago
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously
- dalbasal 9y ago
  thanks. :)
cantrevealname 9y ago
In addition, I like the finality of a cash transaction. For anything other than cash, I have to keep records in case something goes wrong. Example: A hotel might double-bill my credit card, and this has actually happened twice to me. If you pay cash, it's impossible to be double billed at some future point. Perhaps you still want a receipt, but you never need to check it against statements. The finality of cash avoids having to keep, organize, and verify a lot of paper records if you don't really need the receipts.
- sridca 9y ago
  There was a hotel in Brooklyn which required that I provide them a credit card for security deposit. Or was it not the norm?
  - softawre 9y ago
    Almost all hotels do this.
- ragequitta 9y ago
  The finality of cash is also why I typically have none on me. Getting robbed, while rare, would suck real bad if I had more than $20 in my wallet.
Kiro 9y ago
> How does a cashless lemonade stand work? In my country even beggars accept cashless payments.
m_alexgr 9y ago
Agree pretty much apart from the bitcoin failure part. In nine years, bitcoin keeps on ticking and evolving. Segwit was/is a big deal, as lack of segwit held up further development. Lightning, x-chain atomic swaps, Schnorr signatures, MAST, side-chains to name a few additional features and improvements. It's early days yet. Give it time.
- benpiper 9y ago
  The technology is fascinating. But almost nobody uses it as a currency.
Symbiote 9y ago
1. Can your cash do this? [1] A breakdown of spending by my internet bank, by category. 4. In Sweden, and some other European countries (and China?) a lemonade stand works by person-to-person bank transfers, initiated using a mobile phone app. The Swedish one is called Swish, but I link to the Danish one [2] as they have an English explanation. People really do use these apps for things like lemonade stands. I've seen an unattended garage sale, where everything was priced and a sign gave a phone number for payment. It's also commonly used person-to-person, e.g. if a friend owes me for a spare concert ticket, part of a restaurant bill or whatever. [1] http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png [2] https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/The-story-in-English.aspx https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/The-story-in-English.aspx
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  We have a verb in swedish for this: "I'll swish you 50 crowns" "Can you swish me 200?"
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    In Denmark "I'll MobilePay you 50 crowns" or "can you MobilePay me 200?", at least when speaking English. My Danish isn't good enough to reliably say what it is when speaking Danish. Probably something like "Jeg mobilepayer dig halvtres¹ kroner" The system in Britain (Paym) hasn't really caught on. They might be less keen to verb a noun. ¹ This is why I avoid discussing numbers in Danish.
    - uggedal 9y ago
      In Norway it's "I'll vipps you 50 crowns" or "jeg vippser deg 50 kroner". The verb is actually in the Norwegian dictionary now.
      - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        Thanks. This adds to my Norwegian vocabulary :) Not that this is very useful to me right now, but who knows, that bit might change.
stronglikedan 9y ago
5 - I can discretely "upgrade" my service level with particular individuals.
powvans 9y ago
The bitcoin failure (I think it is) teaches something. People don't really give each other money. It's kind of illegal. Money is supposed to move between people and companies or companies and companies, not between people. There is no demand for Peter-pays-Paul. That last bit, that's a profound observation. There is some real demand, but not much. More so there is theoretical demand. In theory I want the option to pay with cash because dammit I want that last vestige of freedom from being tracked and taxed. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe Cash is an important palliative for the feeling that perhaps we aren't as free as we would like to believe.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  > I want that last vestige of freedom Freedom always was an aristocratic privilege. What they sold to the proles - with heavy advertising, at a price up to your life - was a cheap knock-off.
- arghwhat 9y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, "Peter-pays-Paul" is huge in Scandinavia. MobilePay, a person-to-person payment app in Denmark, is a huge deal here. It had 3 million users in 2016 (out of 7 million people!), and its second-priority shop payment feature (that arrived much later) is challenging credit cards. It's used for everything from selling used goods to splitting bills. Swish, the Swedish equivalent, has 4 million users. Vipp, the Norwegian equivalent, has 2.7 million users. Peter-pays-Paul has huge demand here. Bitcoin is just a terrible solution to that problem. (uggedal provided the Swedish and Norwegian numbers).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcv 9y ago
    Tikkie, a Dutch equivalent, has 2 million users. Not as much as the Scandinavian countries (considering a 17 million population here), but that could be because some banks also have their own system. (Tikkie works with all banks and uses iDeal. Requests can be sent over whatsapp and similar systems.)
otakucode 9y ago
I keep waiting for the government to realize that "payment processors" have far more power to regulate the monetary supply than the federal central bank does. We've handed over the majority of transactions to these groups that charge a percentage based, I suppose, on the notion that transferring a larger number over a wire is significantly more difficult than transferring a smaller one. So if they want to set the nations monetary policy, they will. Want to increase the supply of money? Good luck if the payment processors decide to bump their cut up to compensate. Want to decrease it? Good luck when they bump their cut down to keep things as they are.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  The EU is no stranger to heavily regulating them https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight/18-months-impact-interchange-fee-regulation-european-union-cards-market https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...
arghwhat 9y ago
The bitcoin failure (I think it is) teaches something. People don't really give each other money. It's kind of illegal. Money is supposed to move between people and companies or companies and companies, not between people. There is no demand for Peter-pays-Paul. In Denmark, the MobilePay system is massive, and challenging credit card payments. It is designed entirely for person-to-person payments, and only later added support for shop purchases as a lower-priority feature. It is used for all sorts of things, including splitting bills and selling used goods, all legal. Sweden has Swish, but I never figured out if it was popular. MobilePay, on the other hand, is huge. Edit: "Swipp" -> "Swish". Swipp is dead.
- uggedal 9y ago
  Sweden has Swish with over 4 million users. Norway also has a hugely popular p2p payment app called Vipps with 2.7 million users. Disclaimer: I work for Vipps AS
  - arghwhat 9y ago
    Ah, sorry, Swipp was the Danish MobilePay competitor that died due to Danske Bank's disgustingly unfair play (they were part of the Swipp group, but started MobilePay development in the background and launched before Swipp did). I was of course referring to Swish. MobilePay passed 3 million users in 2016 (out of ~7 million people). I don't have any updated statistics. Anyway, with your added numbers, it is quite clear that at least in Scandinavia, person to person transfers are very common.
oldcynic 9y ago
> It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending Both in games with premium currencies like diamonds, and in real life with plastic cards and services, it's been shown time and again that the further you are from actual cash the more you spend. This can't be emphasised enough and is, to my mind, a near complete explanation of the drive for cashless. We, as good consumers, will spend more in a cashless world. When we were struggling to make ends meet after the dot com bust we slowly realised this, and came to draw out cash first for everything possible. If the cash wasn't there first, it did not get bought. I will still, nearing 20 years on, draw cash prior to shopping, or buying fuel etc. Debit cards get used online. The credit card lives in a drawer. Unused and balance free for years.
- eswat 9y ago
  I’m reminded of the benefits of cash whenever I go certain parts of SEA, like the Philippines, where using cash is actually more convenient than using a card (less time dealing with receipts and signatures, don’t have to hope their credit card machine has a working connection, etc.)
- sokoloff 9y ago
  For this same reason, we pay our kids allowance in cash and when they buy toys or other things with it, we make sure they are the one to take the cash out of the little cash purse, carry it in their pocket to the store, and they are the one to physically hand the cash over the cashier. I don't care if it would be 10x easier and I'd get 1.5% cashback on the purchase with the credit card; I want them to have the experience and understand that they are trading away a limited resource that took time and effort to acquire, not just mindless swipe/stick/tap.
debt 9y ago
"1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending." "Going cashless" is a flavor of class warfare. There are some people that absolutely depend on, live on, cash. Believe it or not, there are people that do not have access to cards.
acchow 9y ago
Most of my money is spent on rent or online shopping. Do people really have that much opportunity to spend cash? And for those opportunities, isn't the 2% tax a fairly reasonable price to pay for the safety of never needing to carry cash around and the convenience of never needing to go to an ATM or run out of cash? I imagine petty theft crime has dropped significantly in large part because people stopped carrying cash.
drstewart 9y ago
Cool. Now explain how online transactions will work in your cash-only society.

sitharus 9y ago

Cashless transactions don’t have to go through the card networks. Here in New Zealand around 2/3rds of all retail transactions are done via cards because many years ago the reserve bank mandated free inter-bank transactions. This means direct bank-to-bank transactions via the local EFTPOS network are free for both parties (with exceptions for some low-use plans, and businesses typically rent the terminals). Also the local eBay equivalent TradeMe gained its popularity on this network. Given somebody’s bank account number I can transfer money to their account within an hour (used to be overnight until a few years ago). There’s no reversal for this so it’s safe for the seller, and since it’s a real bank there’s no way to freeze it without a court order. The banks being banks of course are trying to ruin this, since using the big card networks gives them free revenue.

__alias 9y ago
blows my mind that people overseas still use cash. Literally the only reason I ever get cash out is to buy weed
- sitharus 9y ago
  It depends a lot on where you go. Both Australia and Canada are easy to go through cashless, except for small stores due to the card fees. I don’t know about Canada but Australia has capped the card fees so debit cards are more popular than in NZ. Still you don’t really see the vendors at small farmer’s markets with the payclip things like you do in NZ.
- alxndr 9y ago
  And now the cannabis shops in California take credit cards!
mcv 9y ago
There are only 4 things that I still pay with cash: my cleaner, my cheese shop (who refuses to get a pin machine, the luddite), my son's allowance, and money for street performers and beggars. The only thing for which I use credit cards are online purchases from foreign websites that don't support iDeal. Everything else is through regular bank transactions, either through pin card, direct transactions, or iDeal. All Dutch banks support iDeal, and I wish the rest of the world would too because it's vastly superior to credit cards.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Can you share the reasons why it's vastly superior to credit cards? Using my card, I get good post-purchase protection (via threat of chargeback or card issuer-provided warranty increase) and excellent fraud protection.
  - mcv 9y ago
    It's cheaper. More importantly, it's more secure, because it uses my bank's security system and doesn't rely on sending "secret" information like credit card numbers to unknown parties. Everything is handled by my own bank, and if I don't trust my own bank, I can choose a better bank and use that. With credit cards, I have to use whatever payment provider the merchant uses, and either they or the merchant can hang on to my credit card number, which weirdly is sufficient to access my money. Also, there are only two credit card providers that really count; not a lot of choice there. Chargebacks may seem attractive as a buyer, but they also mean that a seller can lose their money after they legitimately sent the goods. Merchants would have to track down individual customers to sue them to get their money back.

supreme_sublime 9y ago

With the amount of political pressure I've seen recently to cut off people from their income (advertiser boycotts, contacting employers directly, etc) I've wondered about money transfers and if people will start going after those companies next. What recourse do you have if banks refuse to take your money? If credit card companies refuse to give you a line of credit? I don't know much about that level of infrastructure but it definitely seems ripe for abuse in this way. I don't know what laws govern this and it concerns me how the current system is set up that through activist pressure that people might not be able to sustain themselves for opinions that are declared outside the Overton window.

reaperducer 9y ago
There are a number of options for people who have to or need to go bankless. Look around in any poor/immigrant neighborhood and you'll see ads for "currency exchanges" that act like banks, pre-paid charge cards, and companies willing to give all kinds of loans as long as they can verify employment or hold your car title. It's not ideal, and it's very easy to get ripped off, but it's possible to live that way. Millions of people do.

mindslight 9y ago

I agree with the entirety of your comment, except for your specific points 1 and 2. Post facto, having spent cash gives you less insight into what it was spent on (unless you want to diligently duplicate the recording of a credit card with your own private ledger). And it's often cited that businesses accepting cash have real costs for doing so, which I tend to believe (armored cars, etc).

dalbasal 9y ago
My point 1 was about me. I like using cash. Point 2 is.. I think your reasoning about cash costs relates to point 4. These kinds of costs are something that big, high turnover businesses are concerned with. I don't think a tiny, rural cafe cares too much that €190 of its €780 daily take is cash.

skrause 9y ago

> 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto an oligopoly. Cashless gives this system a 2% tax on all spending (+ fraud, which retailers pay for). Not in the European Union where this fee is capped to 0,3%.

reaperducer 9y ago
When it's free in the EU, then you'll have a point. Until then you're not addressing his argument.
- germanier 9y ago
  The fee is a bit higher than 0.3% (which only is the regulated interchange – there are a few other costs as well) but the rate was decided upon after evaluating the cost of cash transactions (which aren't actually free – consider insurance against robbery, time spent counting every evening, transport to the bank, bank fees, and similar).
- arcticfox 9y ago
  But surely the effective "tax" of moving cash around, losing it, practically unusably small amounts of change etc. is greater than 0.3% for the vast majority of use cases.
- skrause 9y ago
  I wasn't addressing his argument because I actually agree. I was just pointing out that the 2% is far off in Europe.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    OP... I was simplifying. I don't know the real number for the economy as a whole, but the experience I do have (mostly in the higher risk/cost "card-not-present" scenarios) actual transaction costs are always higher than they seem at first glance. For example, retailers bear the majority of fraud risk. Add that in, and the cost of anti-fraud.. it adds up. Then there's the consumer side, where users "pay" fees, pay interest rates.. My point is that all these digital payment (including the paper-originally CCs) tend to become bottlenecks and oligopolies. Banks, CCs, gateways.. all tend to centralisation, regulation and low competition. All the ingredients for price inflation.

reaperducer 9y ago

> How does a cashless lemonade stand work? In my neighborhood, with Square. Or at least that's how the kids a couple of streets over did it last year. With great big cartoony Visa and MasterCard logos on posterboard.

monocasa 9y ago
And I've heard of beggars with WeChat QR codes in China.

agsamek 9y ago

In Poland (EU) we have BLIK system which allows for up to $1000 instant transfer for a phone number. Free of additional charge. We pay with cards with paypass wirelessly without PIN for small amounts. This is faster than cash. I recently stopped carrying coins and avoid paying cash. And bank transfers are free in most banks. It takes half a day at most to reach destination bank.

rhacker 9y ago

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously

dalbasal 9y ago
thanks. :)

cantrevealname 9y ago

In addition, I like the finality of a cash transaction. For anything other than cash, I have to keep records in case something goes wrong. Example: A hotel might double-bill my credit card, and this has actually happened twice to me. If you pay cash, it's impossible to be double billed at some future point. Perhaps you still want a receipt, but you never need to check it against statements. The finality of cash avoids having to keep, organize, and verify a lot of paper records if you don't really need the receipts.

sridca 9y ago
There was a hotel in Brooklyn which required that I provide them a credit card for security deposit. Or was it not the norm?
- softawre 9y ago
  Almost all hotels do this.
ragequitta 9y ago
The finality of cash is also why I typically have none on me. Getting robbed, while rare, would suck real bad if I had more than $20 in my wallet.

Kiro 9y ago

> How does a cashless lemonade stand work? In my country even beggars accept cashless payments.

m_alexgr 9y ago

Agree pretty much apart from the bitcoin failure part. In nine years, bitcoin keeps on ticking and evolving. Segwit was/is a big deal, as lack of segwit held up further development. Lightning, x-chain atomic swaps, Schnorr signatures, MAST, side-chains to name a few additional features and improvements. It's early days yet. Give it time.

benpiper 9y ago
The technology is fascinating. But almost nobody uses it as a currency.

Symbiote 9y ago

1. Can your cash do this? [1] A breakdown of spending by my internet bank, by category. 4. In Sweden, and some other European countries (and China?) a lemonade stand works by person-to-person bank transfers, initiated using a mobile phone app. The Swedish one is called Swish, but I link to the Danish one [2] as they have an English explanation. People really do use these apps for things like lemonade stands. I've seen an unattended garage sale, where everything was priced and a sign gave a phone number for payment. It's also commonly used person-to-person, e.g. if a friend owes me for a spare concert ticket, part of a restaurant bill or whatever. [1] http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png [2] https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/The-story-in-English.aspx https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/The-story-in-English.aspx

jamesblonde 9y ago
We have a verb in swedish for this: "I'll swish you 50 crowns" "Can you swish me 200?"
- Symbiote 9y ago
  In Denmark "I'll MobilePay you 50 crowns" or "can you MobilePay me 200?", at least when speaking English. My Danish isn't good enough to reliably say what it is when speaking Danish. Probably something like "Jeg mobilepayer dig halvtres¹ kroner" The system in Britain (Paym) hasn't really caught on. They might be less keen to verb a noun. ¹ This is why I avoid discussing numbers in Danish.
  - uggedal 9y ago
    In Norway it's "I'll vipps you 50 crowns" or "jeg vippser deg 50 kroner". The verb is actually in the Norwegian dictionary now.
    - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      Thanks. This adds to my Norwegian vocabulary :) Not that this is very useful to me right now, but who knows, that bit might change.

stronglikedan 9y ago

5 - I can discretely "upgrade" my service level with particular individuals.

powvans 9y ago

The bitcoin failure (I think it is) teaches something. People don't really give each other money. It's kind of illegal. Money is supposed to move between people and companies or companies and companies, not between people. There is no demand for Peter-pays-Paul. That last bit, that's a profound observation. There is some real demand, but not much. More so there is theoretical demand. In theory I want the option to pay with cash because dammit I want that last vestige of freedom from being tracked and taxed. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe Cash is an important palliative for the feeling that perhaps we aren't as free as we would like to believe.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
> I want that last vestige of freedom Freedom always was an aristocratic privilege. What they sold to the proles - with heavy advertising, at a price up to your life - was a cheap knock-off.
arghwhat 9y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, "Peter-pays-Paul" is huge in Scandinavia. MobilePay, a person-to-person payment app in Denmark, is a huge deal here. It had 3 million users in 2016 (out of 7 million people!), and its second-priority shop payment feature (that arrived much later) is challenging credit cards. It's used for everything from selling used goods to splitting bills. Swish, the Swedish equivalent, has 4 million users. Vipp, the Norwegian equivalent, has 2.7 million users. Peter-pays-Paul has huge demand here. Bitcoin is just a terrible solution to that problem. (uggedal provided the Swedish and Norwegian numbers).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mcv 9y ago
  Tikkie, a Dutch equivalent, has 2 million users. Not as much as the Scandinavian countries (considering a 17 million population here), but that could be because some banks also have their own system. (Tikkie works with all banks and uses iDeal. Requests can be sent over whatsapp and similar systems.)

otakucode 9y ago

I keep waiting for the government to realize that "payment processors" have far more power to regulate the monetary supply than the federal central bank does. We've handed over the majority of transactions to these groups that charge a percentage based, I suppose, on the notion that transferring a larger number over a wire is significantly more difficult than transferring a smaller one. So if they want to set the nations monetary policy, they will. Want to increase the supply of money? Good luck if the payment processors decide to bump their cut up to compensate. Want to decrease it? Good luck when they bump their cut down to keep things as they are.

kalleboo 9y ago
The EU is no stranger to heavily regulating them https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight/18-months-impact-interchange-fee-regulation-european-union-cards-market https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...

arghwhat 9y ago

The bitcoin failure (I think it is) teaches something. People don't really give each other money. It's kind of illegal. Money is supposed to move between people and companies or companies and companies, not between people. There is no demand for Peter-pays-Paul. In Denmark, the MobilePay system is massive, and challenging credit card payments. It is designed entirely for person-to-person payments, and only later added support for shop purchases as a lower-priority feature. It is used for all sorts of things, including splitting bills and selling used goods, all legal. Sweden has Swish, but I never figured out if it was popular. MobilePay, on the other hand, is huge. Edit: "Swipp" -> "Swish". Swipp is dead.

uggedal 9y ago
Sweden has Swish with over 4 million users. Norway also has a hugely popular p2p payment app called Vipps with 2.7 million users. Disclaimer: I work for Vipps AS
- arghwhat 9y ago
  Ah, sorry, Swipp was the Danish MobilePay competitor that died due to Danske Bank's disgustingly unfair play (they were part of the Swipp group, but started MobilePay development in the background and launched before Swipp did). I was of course referring to Swish. MobilePay passed 3 million users in 2016 (out of ~7 million people). I don't have any updated statistics. Anyway, with your added numbers, it is quite clear that at least in Scandinavia, person to person transfers are very common.

oldcynic 9y ago

> It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending Both in games with premium currencies like diamonds, and in real life with plastic cards and services, it's been shown time and again that the further you are from actual cash the more you spend. This can't be emphasised enough and is, to my mind, a near complete explanation of the drive for cashless. We, as good consumers, will spend more in a cashless world. When we were struggling to make ends meet after the dot com bust we slowly realised this, and came to draw out cash first for everything possible. If the cash wasn't there first, it did not get bought. I will still, nearing 20 years on, draw cash prior to shopping, or buying fuel etc. Debit cards get used online. The credit card lives in a drawer. Unused and balance free for years.

eswat 9y ago
I’m reminded of the benefits of cash whenever I go certain parts of SEA, like the Philippines, where using cash is actually more convenient than using a card (less time dealing with receipts and signatures, don’t have to hope their credit card machine has a working connection, etc.)
sokoloff 9y ago
For this same reason, we pay our kids allowance in cash and when they buy toys or other things with it, we make sure they are the one to take the cash out of the little cash purse, carry it in their pocket to the store, and they are the one to physically hand the cash over the cashier. I don't care if it would be 10x easier and I'd get 1.5% cashback on the purchase with the credit card; I want them to have the experience and understand that they are trading away a limited resource that took time and effort to acquire, not just mindless swipe/stick/tap.

debt 9y ago

"1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending." "Going cashless" is a flavor of class warfare. There are some people that absolutely depend on, live on, cash. Believe it or not, there are people that do not have access to cards.

acchow 9y ago

Most of my money is spent on rent or online shopping. Do people really have that much opportunity to spend cash? And for those opportunities, isn't the 2% tax a fairly reasonable price to pay for the safety of never needing to carry cash around and the convenience of never needing to go to an ATM or run out of cash? I imagine petty theft crime has dropped significantly in large part because people stopped carrying cash.

drstewart 9y ago

Cool. Now explain how online transactions will work in your cash-only society.