Swedes rebelling against a cashless society (2018)

I&#x27;m Swedish and this stuff makes me really worried. Especially since the main way for two people to exchange small amounts of money is through a proprietary app that uses a proprietary ID system (owned by a for-profit company) that only runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.<p>I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea.<p>I will say, however, that buses not taking cash is perfectly fine. They use NFC&#x2F;RFID ticket cards which can&#x27;t identify you. Not being able to buy tickets with cash is a little less fine.

I recently moved back to Sweden after living 4 years in Germany. I don&#x27;t have any cards, and I don&#x27;t carry a &quot;smart&quot;phone anymore; in Germany this didn&#x27;t cause any trouble at all and I was far from alone.<p>Much of the current Swedish society is currently closed to me, I know of three shops and one cafe in the (200k people) city center that accept cash. Some of it has been gradual but it changed dramatically during the time I was away.<p>Believe me, this is not the kind of world anyone really wants to live in. It&#x27;s all very convenient until the crap hits the fan, putting this much power in the hands of any authority is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention those who have no choice.

Being able to pay through cards and phones is super convenient, but cash should never not be an option.<p>Card companies, payment apps and banks are constantly tracking your purchases and profiling you. This data can be leaked&#x2F;stolen&#x2F;sold, and is always available to governments and those in&#x2F;with power.<p>Cash is (almost completely) anonymous. You should always be able to pay with cash if you want.

Part of why cashless works is the same reason the Swedish welfare state generally works: a trust of government. Contrast this with Germany and its history with...lists; it&#x27;s best not to have yourself be too traceable. I think the US is somewhere in-between, but at the end of the day, we&#x27;ll hand over a lot for 2% cashback and avoid paying for journalism at all costs.

I am Norwegian and we seldom use cash as well. I use cash perhaps a couple of times per year. However I am totally against the reliance on electronic payment. Cash should alway be a viable option.<p>Or at least the electronic payment systems we use need to be more robust. I remember from living in the Netherlands that they had a neat system called Chipknip. It was electronic money. So the machines accepting it did not rely on having a direct connection to a bank at all times.<p>It think if we are to be cashless we need something like that. It needs to be possible to make payments without having a physical connection to a bank at all times.<p>A big problem with electronic payment is that we are handing over a huge amount of cash to companies like VISA and Mastercard. I think when all of society operates in this fashion there really is a need for a government supported solution, because this is not merely a question of a &quot;neat&quot; feature you can buy but essential infrastructure in society.<p>It is reckless to leave such essential infrastructure in the hands of private companies.

In Norway, next to Sweden, accepting cash is mandatory and you can get fined (after a warning it seems) if you don&#x27;t.<p>The reasoning is we don&#x27;t want everything to break down just because the power grid or backbone networks breaks down.

We aren’t (Weren’t) rebelling. There isn’t even a debate about it. I still haven’t used cash in years. Certainly not since the 2018 of the article.<p>We really need “digital cash”, ie a government backed digital currency that can be used with the convenience of cards but with the anonymity (at the point of sale) of cash.<p>I don’t believe in regular non-state cryptocurrencies for various reasons, not least because anonymity of all transactions isn’t really desirable in a high tax welfare state with high trust that people pay taxes.<p>The Swedish central back is working on it, so maybe this is not too far away. One should be aware though that “digital cash“ doesn’t solve all the problems, it’s not as resilient technically as paper cash.

Its a bold headline, but as the article explains, its not actually very many Swedes who seem to be &#x27;rebelling&#x27;.<p>People I know are trying to get pensioners they are &#x27;responsible for&#x27; to stop carrying and using cash, as its far higher risk.<p>I don&#x27;t personally know of anybody rebelling against the cashless society, not in any age group. Its not even talked about.<p>On the other hand, &#x27;do you take swish&#x27; (a phone-to-phone payment method) is asked all the time. Lunch with friends? Instead of everyone ordering separately, just order together, and divvy it up with Swish when you get the bill. Etc.<p>I have a single banknote folded up my wallet, just for emergencies, and I haven&#x27;t used it this year yet.

In a society where cash is an option there is a roof on how much money you can extract from the population as if you ask for too much people will increasingly avail themselves of cash.<p>The cost of switching to using cash is a trip to the bank&#x2F;atm.<p>The closer you get to cashless the more you can afford to screw people to the wall.<p>For example does anyone recall the idea us bankers floated about negative nominal interest on checking?

The convenience of electronic payments is obvious. But cashless sounds more like a restriction, indeed inconvenience.<p>Say, one lost a wallet and phone (robbed or just that, lost) and needs to get back home somehow. Public transportation requires an electronic ticket, cab needs card. What&#x27;s then?<p>Walk to your bank branch, explain to driver the story and pay later, hope a compelled passenger would pay for you?<p>Lending someone a dollar does not oblige one whether you trust the person on not. Paying for one directly is more involved. Surely people don&#x27;t lend their cards to strangers, willfully.

Maybe I&#x27;m biased but I much prefer the way the UK has handled this. Card payments are <i>everywhere</i>, contactless payments are everywhere (life changer in London&#x27;s public transport where touching in and out with your phone&#x2F;card automatically charges you the correct price meaning that you don&#x27;t need to deal with tickets) and everyone still has the option to use cash.

Cash in the only practical anonymous-when-you-need-it-to-be way to pay still.<p><i>Don&#x27;t let it die until we have alternative suitable anonymous and un-blockable-by-cyberattacks (eg. &quot;it must still work while the internet is down&quot;) currencies!</i><p>(Note: no, we don&#x27;t have yet, all current crypto currencies are &quot;barely working prototypes&quot; at best, all of them have issues that still need ironing out! Bitcoin itself is like a proof-of-concept-pre-MVP that got &quot;rushed into production&quot;. And the blockchain itself... we <i>NEED</i> to have a way of <i>fully erasing history</i> from it, like paper money do, we <i>don&#x27;t yet know how to do that while keeping the nice properties of blockchain</i>... all these are open research questions, Satoshi only made the first baby step!)

Excerpts from the 2022 Chairman of Harmony answer regarding the Holy See rejection of the Panda chip:<p>&quot;It is a common misconception that the so called &#x27;Mark of the Beast&#x27; chip has anything to do with money. The Panda chip is nothing more than a pandemic health and contact tracing beacon.&quot;<p>&quot;Because the chip is always available and very secure, a lot of the citizens do choose to use it for payments.&quot;<p>&quot;We find the ideas surrounding cash obsolete. All cash is uniquely identifiable and most major stores just destroy received cash for sanitary reasons and print cash on demand for change.&quot;<p>&quot;Regarding precious metal purchases, the Government does allow purchase, except gold which is required to manufacture the Panda chip and related accessories&quot;.

A lot of the comments to this post talks about the dangers with a cashless society in terms of giving up the right to privacy. While that might be true right now one must remember that the technological advances of cashless payments are very new and we must work towards a cashless payment solution that can meet the privacy needs that cash provides. Saying that &quot;you should always be able to pay with cash if you want&quot; sounds technophobic.

Not may, has caused. I&#x27;ve seen it myself.<p>On the plus side the app StreetComplete has merged in a quest that allows people to easily answer whether a business in Sweden accepts cash or not.<p>So hopefully that will improve the poor OSM data set and allow people to easier find cash payment places.<p>For the nerds out there it uses the OSM tag payment:cash=yes.

Cashless is a dream for government because they can switch the populace to a negative interest rate.

How do tourists pay for things in Sweden? Especially smaller value things.<p>One of the most inconvenient aspects about visiting China is paying for small things. Large department stores and high end restaurants will accept foreign credit cards, but mom and pop stores don’t.<p>While most still accept cash, sometimes the smaller stores or street vendors won’t have enough for change and you have to wait for them to get it. A few times I even got a discount when they couldn’t give me exact change.<p>I installed WeChat and AliPay last time I visited, but the payments don’t work if you don’t have a local number, ID, or bank account.

I am from Spain, and today the people in power there are socialistic(psoe) and communist(podemos),the last one friends and money receivers from Venezuela&#x27;s Hugo Chavez, Iran and Cuba.<p>I attended a talk in the past(&quot;Know your enemy&quot;) when they defended and wanted to collect money and people for helping Colombia&#x27;s FARC.<p>Those guys want to destroy democracy from democracy, just like Hitler, Mussolini or Chavez.<p>The last thing you want to do is give a Government like this all the information of all transactions made by the people in the country.<p>And that is exactly what &quot;cash free&quot; means. In countries like the US the mechanism of control of political power by people are more powerful, but even there companies control and concentration of information is too high(Americans distrust Government but trust companies) for a healthy system.

As a student who recently spent their savings on a Macbook 16 inch, just to have it stolen shortly after I really would have preferred selling it for cash would not have been an option for the thiefs.<p>in the same manner, I gladly would have accepted mass surveillance if it meant the thief would actually get caught.

There is a world trend to criticise skandinavia (Scandinavian countries are always in the top 10 of best places to live) . The BBC has been for the last 10 years an awful source of it. The hit Scandinavia to divert attention of their own problems. EVVERYTHING they criticise is worst in the UK.

How can you have a cashless society if I have to enter the pin every time I use my card? During my last trip to Stockholm using cards was more of a hassle than using cash. London&#x2F;UK is more of cashless society than Stockholm&#x2F;Sweden.

Why put all eggs in a single bucket?

A cashless society is a step on the way to communism. Whatever you think about communism (fear it or want it). Whoever doesn&#x27;t want communism (which is much more likely to be a dystopia than an utopia) should defend cash to the death.

And when the (broke) Swedish government raises taxes sky-high, they will all flock to cash, gold, bitcoin and other off-the-radar payment methods.