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Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

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Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#261

Post by webster23 »

dmitriy_ko wrote: post #219
kristofferR wrote: post #97

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't…

That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.

Just nitpicking, but I believe it was Hermes, not Bender. edit: https://external-preview.redd.it/QkC-IFnu4weXJdqXPJCgaswRHAy...

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#262

Post by Spooky23 »

bamboozled wrote: post #135
eksemplar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use…

The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.

It is quite liberating. My family went cash only a couple of years ago. We spend less and tbh there isn’t much downside.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#263

Post by gambiting »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #259
gambiting wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you wait 3 days for the money to actually arrive. I frequently send money between EU countries and the speed of transaction is abysmal unless you want to transfer to be denominated in Euro which means that if you're sending money between two non-euro currencies you're losing money twice.

SEPA is for euro-denominated bank accounts. That's what the E is.

You can send a sepa transfer out of a non-euro denominated bank account to another non-euro denominated account, but it will get converted to Euro first. That's why I said you get charged twice - once at origin and again at the destination. And you might want to do that if you want the speed of a SEPA transfer - regular inter-bank transfers between different EU countries still take days to process.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#264

Post by shellkr »

kristofferR wrote: post #97

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't…

Ok... so you went to a festival without money? How would you have solved this without Swish? As you said there was no ATMs. Card readers are expensive and not really viable for most booths. They are also kind of a monopoly.

You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too.

For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#265

Post by Spooky23 »

yholio wrote: post #233
bamboozled wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.

The trouble with cash is that you cannot really control high-school dropouts to charge $10 for a $2 beer without skimming a bit on the side. Hence this whole "here's some fake money that only works here" BS.

Pretty trivial to solve... sell drink tickets.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#266

Post by joosters »

eigenvector wrote: post #155
kristofferR wrote: post #97

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't…

You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.

WeChat payments work fine with foreign cards...

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#267

Post by gammateam »

mort96 wrote: post #251
gammateam wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution, yet had some recourse for fraudulent transactions, didn't require downloading hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain, processed more than a handful of transactions globally per ten minutes, and where you didn't lose all your m…

Lightning + Watchtowers

Its coming

For some of the other things, best practices prevent much of that. I could imagine a common practice where base layer transactions to open a channel use a joint account that requires X of Y signatures, where X-n keys are yours, and the remainder being a friend or actual intermediary business which only facilitates avoiding user error. After the channels are open it having no say in how things are transmitted. I also imagine this being seamless. Each element of a computer's boot sequence were all major stepping stones at one point, and now computers don't even show you the list of things its doing anymore. I see this technology going that way once UX designers figure out how to get paid in this space.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#268

Post by angry_octet »

protomyth wrote: post #165
bouncycastle wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to share about my experience about the "permission" part. I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, s…

I was at a gas station in Grand Forks, ND in the middle of winter at 2AM fueling up. I had traveled this route and stopped at this gas station at about the same time of night multiple times when I was going from ND to MN and back. The card (Citibank Visa) had a large open credit line, but it somehow got rejected because (and I quote) "they installed new software"[1]. This was a bit before I had a cellphone and luckil…

I remember as a kid how much money my parents would have to carry while on holiday, banks were closed and ATMs rare and often empty, shops in the country often wouldn't take cheques. Credit cards resulted in really slow vendor payment (remember paper credit card chunk clunk? those numbers are raised for a reason) and caused cash flow issues.

Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.

I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#269

Post by StanislavPetrov »

One thing I haven't seen mentioned which is of particular concern given recent developments is that if society is cashless, what if the bank or "swish" or whatever private company is running cashless transactions decides to "deplatform" you because they don't like your political opinions (or the color of your tie, or anything else). Its one thing for a social media site to erase someone's online presence, or a hosting company to prevent you from having a web presence, or even Paypal preventing you from getting electronic payments through there service - because your life doesn't depend on it. If 'swish' decides it no longer wants your business, how do you survive? How do you buy food? How do you pay the rent? Aside from the Orwellian privacy/tracking implications (by both governments and corporations), the massive transfer of power to electronic transaction corporations is frightening.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#270

Post by AnssiH »

flurdy wrote: post #245

The propriety solutions and its near monopoly in both Sweden & Norway (and perhaps other countries) are also due to the slow expansion and adoption of Apple Pay and Google/Android Pay into those countries. Apple Pay was only launched in Norway earlier this year and Google Pay only a few weeks ago. So the propriety solutions have had a lot of time to establish their monopoly. Also, Apple/Google pay uses the Visa/Maste…

> Also, Apple/Google pay uses the Visa/Mastercard/Amex networks whilst 8 out of 10 of all card transactions in Norway is via BankAxept. BankAxept payments are near instant and has a very low transaction fee. A flat fee of 24 øre (0.03 USD) which most of the time a lot less than Visa/Mastercard that charge of 1-2%.

For comparison, in Finland, where debit cards are all VISA and Mastercard, the merchant rate for those cards is usually ~0.3% (with Nets capping it at 0.75€). Non-EU cards have higher fees.

(Finnish source e.g. https://www.yrittajat.fi/uutiset/572780-maksupaatteet-hintav...)

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