As much as I hate using cash, I understand that the credit card companies charge ridiculous fees to businesses and also that people with very low income don't always have access to digital forms of payment. Maybe Sweden does better with equipping their entire society with digital tools, but in the US I don't think we are ready for a fully digital payment society.
I don't like using cashless anything because I know part of the cost is my privacy. Having said that, convenience is a powerful draw and cash can be a pain, especially when you have to find a spot for small coins.
nobody should be including apple or google spy apps in their payment processing
If you are using Mastercard in the US, Google will be getting transaction data all the same: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040
Look into Monero. You get the benefits of digital payments, but you get the privacy of cash.
there haven't been card fees for end users in Sweden for many years. handling cash is a lot more expensive since you need somewhere secure to keep change, you loose time at the till handling the money, and you need to pay for someone to come pick it up. the time gained from just having the customers pay with card means businesses gladly swallow the fees.
and yes, i'm always surprised when going abroad how much more analog everything is. the nordics and Baltic's are generally at about the same level (with Estonia way ahead), but the rest of the continent feels like it's 10 years behind. I was once asked if I really wanted to pay with card in a corner shop in Leipzig, since the card fee was €10.
not that i'm a fan of the digitalisation, it makes marginalised groups even more marginalised. i see my elderly relatives struggling with it often.
The end user didn't pay directly, but the companies very much pay for this privilege
Which is why Swish, and in Norway, Vipps has been a big thing. So the banks can get that revenue for themselves instead of sharing with visa / Mastercard
It's extremely disappointing to me (admittedly in the US) that Covid seems to have obliterated any chance for a large-scale investigation on payment processors' stranglehold on our financial systems. The fees that Visa/Mastercard/etc. charge, especially for tiny merchants with insanely low transaction numbers, are criminal.
In the EU and UK, heavy regulation, especially of Visa and MasterCard, means the fees are actually lower than the costs of handling cash. Lots of businesses want only card transactions because it works out better for them and most people don't carry any cash so that need to offer card payments, and so it makes even less sense to offer both methods. The only industries who like cash are likely trying some form of tax evasion.
Cleverly, they banned businesses from charging any payment fees and suddenly, businesses negotiated and found suppliers offering low payment fees. We don't have anything like these convenience fees for paying with cards over cheque that I hear about.
Amex still charges higher fees so many places still don't take those cards. The value of benefits (air miles, cashback) have gone down significantly but in reality, it was essentially transferring wealth from the poor (who could never get these cards) to the rich, through these fees, so works out better overall.
The banks here advertise that they help everyone get bank accounts and social benefits are paid into bank accounts so I assume everyone is able to get an account. However, I do wonder if some people, especially the homeless, slip through the cracks.
In America, you can't open a bank account without an address. That means that the homeless population can't open a bank account (not easily, anyway), and therefore can't get a debit card.
Cashless is a nice idea, but it is extremely prohibitive against the most vulnerable people (which, sadly, might be part of the point).
It's largely a non-issue in the Nordic countries as you basically have to voluntarily opt out of any government aid programs to be homeless, which understandably most don't. This goes for most, if not all, vulnerable groups; most of the help is decently robust, at least enough to keep you fed and in housing. So I don't think it's a very large portion of the consideration, almost everything is paid via mobile pay, checks (any, not just from working) are all done digitally as well.
Its still an issue for refugees and domestic abuse survivors
In Germany any EU resident has a right to a basic account, in case you're homeless you should have an address because you're in a shelter, if you insist on sleeping rough (or the municipality is just too fucked up, happens in places) you can give the address of a social work organisation (those are all over also doing debtor counselling and a lot of other stuff).
Only valid reason for a bank to refuse basic business is if you tried to defraud them. They don't have to give you a credit line, but they do have to accept your money, store it, and let you wire it (incl. POS payments etc).
Identity fraud is not an issue because they'll want to see a proper ID which, if you're legally in the country, you have.
It's less about paying, though, you can always pay with cash in Germany, it's about the welfare authorities not wanting to handle cash and cheques only if actually necessary.
It's funny because actually you can receive mails pretty much everywhere without giving an actual address. P.O boxes and post restante. Only banks keep enforcing residential addresses as it was a guarantee of having lack of identity frauds.
The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.
But there is also the risk of bad actors, which could also be e.g. Russia, getting access to decades of payment history through a hack, if everything is digital. Having that data for every citizen of a country could enable efficient profiling of people in the country using big data analysis technologies.
The kind of thing you could find out with the transaction data is who are working in the military or security police, who is sympathetic to Russia and at the same time vulnerable to work with foreign governments, and potential blackmailing material relating to people in these or other groups. I'm sure the analysts working for the bad actor can come up with even more useful things to look for in the data.
There are of course a lot of other data sources that bad actors are interested in and that are easier to hack, but the financial history seems more comprehensive source of information than most other ones.
The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.
Or entities. The USA had a brief oil crisis recently because one of the major pipeline companies had their billing system hacked. Since the company couldn't verify whether someone had paid, they just didn't supply any oil.
Couple that with some misleading news stories and social media panic, and it blew up into a proper shortage from people hoarding all the petrol, and leaving none left.
Not to mention total monetary surveillance
Hmm, I don't anticipate the government to have many issues with that part... But if they have access, then enemies of the state may also gain access, which is the real problem they care about here.
I was once a proponent of cashless societies. Not anymore. Too many vulnerabilities, too many ways for governments to take control of your finances.
Something we can thank the Russians for and hackers everywhere.
Yup, good things can happen for bad reasons.
We have cash?
o_O
Haven't used it for years.
It's still legal tender so they have to accept it. They don't like it, but they do. Last time I visited Norway I held up the line at the grocery store trying to buy candy with cash that had been gifted to me. I'm not sure the cashier knew what to do with it.
Edit: many people telling me they are not required. From what I could find, cash is still "tvunget betalingsmiddel", but there are some broad exceptions. Ref. So, I don't think I was out of line expecting to pay cash at the grocery store. However, that was the only time I paid cash when I visited last time, so yeah, it's basically cashless already.
legal tender
As far as I understood it in the last 20 years, it is only legal tender for debt facing the goverment. No private business has to accept cash. They do not have to accept cards either. If they wish, they could demand payments only in acorns or bottle caps if they wanted to. Only govermental Institutes (eg. for taxes, fines, etc.) have to always accept cash so you can always free yourself from outstanding debits without needing a bank account as bank wiring or credit cards are a private 3rd party business that can not be guaranteed for every citizen (as banks can arbitrary decline service to people).
Shops in Sweden very often state that they don't accept cash - and it's perfectly legal for them to make that choice.
Noone uses cash in Sweden, except for maybe drug dealers and super old people(and the occasional tourist). Most businesses dont even accept cash anymore.
It isnt just the convenience of not having to carry cash, it is also much safer. Much lower risk of getting robbed, for both individuals and businesses.
Cash is still used a lot. Especially for second hand small purchases. Not everyone wants to do the PayPal dance at a car boot.
Much lower risk of getting robbed
Maybe that works in Sweden, but in other places you get shot if you're not carrying money with you 😅
I think those places need more support systems to reduce the number of people that becomes desperate enough to do that.
Yeah, considering how bad banks and other financial institutions are at IT security and the fact that there's no incentive for a capitalist financial institution to fix that problem, it's not a good idea.
That's not entirely true. In order to be allowed to keep processing transactions you have to adhere to strict rules which do get regularly audited. And then there's the whole "customers will switch to another more reliable party in case of outages or security problems". And trust me, I've seen first-hand that they do.
You have to put on a show that you are sticking to those processes, on paper. But the fines for data breaches are generally way less than they save on not having a fully funded IT department and using security products that someone got a kickback for rather than the best product.
"Hacking" isn't some magical, intensely creative process for geniuses loke on TV. For the most part, it's usually just finding the really common things that IT departments don't do because they are underfunded and treat IT people like replaceable cogs. There is software out there to exploit those deficiencies. So they are forced to do things like use default or obvious admin passwords because who knows who is going to be there tomorrow to fix something and without the proper tools to store credentials, there's no way to properly secure things.
And when a security vulnerability is found, there's a reason why many don't bother informing the company before going to the media. Those companies pour tons of money into lawyers to avoid admitting the fault, often getting the innocent person who found the problem arrested, and never fix the actual issue. Just ask any pro whitehat security researcher not hired by the company all the things they have to do to protect themselves from being sued or arrested for "hacking" when they notice a problem.
And government technical auditors are a rarity because the regulators are underfunded. So they might go through some small list of things during regular audits, but they don't know to check if a DBMS system that contains backups and is stored "in the cloud" is using a default password or other common hacking targets. Hackers don't go after the primary infrastructure most of the time. It's not necessary because there are so many sloppy processes or left over insecure projects that "the last guy" was working on or that got defunded before it was completed, but only the primary infrastructure gets audited usually because that's all there is time and money for.
As for going somewhere else, there often aren't other places to go and when there are they usually have the same problem because there's very little reason for any of them to compete with each other. Most industries have consolidated so much that there are only a handful of parent companies left so it's easy to collude just because their leaders are often all in the same room at conferences and such.
I think you're being too pessimistic about IT security, particularly in the Financial sector. A lot of the security rules and audits aren't even government-run, it's the sector regulating itself. And trust me, they are pretty thorough and quite nitpicky about stuff.
The cost of failing an audit also often isn't even a fine, it's direct exclusion from a payment scheme. Basically, do it right or don't do it at all. Given that that is a strict requirement for staying in business, most of these companies will have sufficiently invested in IT security.
Of course it's not airtight, no system really is. But particularly in the financial sector most companies really do have their IT security in order.
Though having cash is not enough. The stores also need to be able to accept cash without internet usage. I think we had a case in germany a few years ago, where some supermarkets could not sell anything, because the servers, to which the local payment system connected (also uses for cash) didn't work. Not sure, if that was because of a security incident.
Yeees! Great! I like cash.
Sweden is otherwise cool with having a zero privacy payment system? I'm a little Suprised this made it that far even there. When I see a business that says it does not accept cash, I stay away even if I wasn't planning to use cash anyway.
Cashless can only work if you adopt a digital cash such as monero, other wise you are taking away privacy, control and possibly small transactions (depending on what fees are common in your country)
In a cashless society banks and credit companies become your rulers as you have no real way to bypass them.
I suspect that any country that tries to go cashless without a real cash alternative, will just find itself with a new form of cash (gold, silver, etc) since eventually there will be enough people trying to avoid fees and taxes
Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.
There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.
Meanwhile in Denmark: FULL STEAM AHEAD! Next stop on the digitalisation train, all of your identification papers!
This would suck so bad. My debit card's chip went bad and the bank can't reissue me a new one until it expires. I've been using cash as a fallback when I don't want to do the '3 chip failure timeout then swipe' dance just to purchase some soda.
Report it lost instead. I've lost cards loads of times over the years. One phone call and the new one is on its way. However the fact your bank wouldn't issue your replacement makes me think they would charge you for this privilege.
They seriously won't issue one even though it's faulty? Surely it's their fault as suppliers of a defective product that is probably still owned by them in some legalise way!
My chip stopped working and after one quick phone call they sent a replacement one. Do all the banks you can access do this or worth changing over?
That doesn't seem right at all, no matter the country. And do you not have tap payments?
The netherlands are already looking into it: https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/
The project could be used via paper trail, as far as I understand it.
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