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> I have three separate items on me I can use to pay - my card holder with bank cards, my phone and my watch. That's more redundancy than with cash, which is on
by boricj 3y ago
> I have three separate items on me I can use to pay - my card holder with bank cards, my phone and my watch. That's more redundancy than with cash, which is one item (wallet).
All of which are electronic and depend on centralized services. Bank notes and coins work offline and without electricity.
Not too long ago, a restaurant I went to with a coworker had an Internet outage and no card or mobile payment would go through. I paid for the whole bill since I was the only one carrying cash, then we went to the nearest ATM to reimburse me.
I always carry cash. I don't use it often but it always works, even if everything else fails.
- ACS_Solver 3y agoThe hardware/software infrastructure for cards and mobile payments is separate. We get card outages or Swish (mobile) outages occasionally, I don't remember any that affected both. Card payments are expected to work offline. We're so dependent on IT systems that even cash doesn't always work. One of the most significant outages we've ever experienced was when Coop, a grocery store chain, had to close all its stores for a couple days because of an IT outage. It didn't help that the stores accept cash - the payments still couldn't be registered, receipts couldn't be printed, so the stores were completely unable to function. We clearly need a robust fallback solution. Some kind of payment system that can work despite centralized outages (a bank's systems failing) or local outages at the merchant. But that shouldn't be cash. The practice of exchanging fragile, filthy pieces of paper whose ownership you cannot prove once outside your possession belongs to the past, we can do much better now.