Sweden leads the race to become cashless society

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree that there are risks with a cashless society (especially from a privacy perspective), but it's not incredibly hard to understand the positive effects of cash-free (as you seem to suggest).

- Vendors not needing to carry cash, significantly decreasing (or even eliminating) security-related risks (e.g. grocery stores/bus drivers getting robbed)

- Removing PoS that affect quality of service for the actual service provided (e.g. someone paying the bus fare and holding up the ride)

- Reducing the possibility for criminals to launder dirty money (the flipside of the privacy aspect).