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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

#351

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jakewins wrote: post #295
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…

> it only accepts Swedish bank accounts I have a Swedish bank account, but I still can't use Swish because I have an American phone. It's infuriating.

Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not.

The only requirements are that you

1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and

2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone.

If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.

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

#352

Post by antt »

corodra wrote: post #100

I can’t find the article, but didn’t another Nordic country, where they’re going cashless already find a flaw? Their communication infrastructure had some sort of disruption, I don’t think it was an attack, but a failure of something for like half a day. Because of that, merchant services were screwed. Few people could buy anything since few carried cash. Don’t get me wrong, I barely carry cash on me. I just have a b…

Back in the old country we had a dozen currencies, gold and jewels hidden in a fake brick for that exact reason.

When you need to buy a train ticket to get away from the Germans or Russians you don't want to be asking "Sorry do you accept AmEx?".

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

#353

Post by akvadrako »

eric_h wrote: post #170

I like physical cash. I don’t always use it, and generally use my points earning credit card at places I frequent, but don’t at places I’m new to or have no intention of returning to (unless I don’t have enough cash on me). The number of times my card has been stolen has entered into the 10s, even in our new chip card era (I’ve had three chip cards compromised, but can only definitively attribute one of those to it h…

Chips use a private key to sign transactions and can't be copied, at least without being taken apart. So they are secure if all merchants require digital signatures. But for credit cards, they don't do anything to prevent your number from being stolen.

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

#354

Post by akvadrako »

z3t4 wrote: post #211

With physical money there is wear and tear, but every time a "digital" bill change hands 1-5% of it's monetary value is lost (transferred to someone else pocket).

That's only true with some digital transactions. In Europe most merchants that only accept local cards pay 0.3% or about 25 cents.

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

#355

Post by SiempreViernes »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #235

My problem with cashless and just about everything electronic tech is: What happens when the network/power fails? What's the goto alternative? No one seems to point that out? It should not stop progress but it's important to make contingency plans in case of mass failure. I wonder if salt as money will be fashionable again? :)

People do point it out, and mostly the solution has been to just increase reliability of the systems.

Recently the town of Växjö had a almost complete power outage, but despite the store being on emergency lighting only, the payment terminals still worked.

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

#356

Post by retsibsi »

stale2002 wrote: post #153
pishpash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction? The only reason I can think of would be false positive on fraud detection or system error or the such, all problems with the medium, not with centralization/permissions.

> I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction? This happens all of the time to lots of people. The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies. If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which brok…

> It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.

It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.

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

#357

Post by crispyporkbites »

avaika wrote: post #248
ploggingdev wrote: post #60

No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless? I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone numbe…

Good point. There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later. So better to increase the insuranc…

This doesn't make much sense - insurance is about sharing risk amoung common entities, so increasing the premiums based on risk on micro-factors isn't really that helpful. You would probably get good enough performance from a couple of basic, easily obtained variables (age, weight, family history), instead of tracking, organizing and figuring out all of these variables.

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

#358

Post by bjelkeman-again »

metildaa wrote: post #296
plufz wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning d…

Its not just the government that has this data, but every intermediary in the non-cash payment chain. Mastercard for example sells its payment data to Google, who uses it to correlate online ad viewing with in store purchases. There is no way to opt out of this if you use Mastercard, and other intermediaries do similar shady things with your data.

IF you can’t opt out of this in EU then it goes against GDPR (actually they must let you opt in). It would be interesting to dig deeper here.

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

#359

Post by jacobush »

exikyut wrote: post #327
dunnevens wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of an old scifi story. Someone in a far future or advanced alien society runs across a paper book. "A means of conveying information without needing power and without the risk of surveillance? Excellent!" (paraphrased from memory).

I like How Wall-E played that concept really hard.

It did?

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

#360

Post by mrb »

akvadrako wrote: post #340
mrb wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other cryptos are fully anonymous & untraceable. For example zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to conceal all elements of a transaction (sender, receiver, amount.)

Zcash only uses those for some transactions because the complexity is so high. It also requires connecting to the payment network via an IP address, which isn't really anonymous.

«Zcash only uses those for some transactions»

No, Zcash offers the option to always use shielded transactions, if that's what you want. The choice to use a shielded or unshielded transaction rests solely in the hands of the user.

It is true that CPU and memory complexity use to be high for shielded transactions. However Sapling just activated (https://z.cash/blog/sapling-activation-complete/) and it resolves the issue: a shielded transaction used to take up to minutes of CPU time and 3GB+ of RAM, but now can be done in 1 second with ~40MB: https://medium.com/@EthAdvisor/everything-you-need-to-know-a...

Furthermore, Zcash promotes the use of TOR if users wish to hide their IP address.

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