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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

#371

Post by wott »

clubm8 wrote: post #281
sethhochberg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one. Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choo…

> You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. I wonder how many make theirs 1234

Especially since you're drunk/high or will be very soon and won't be able to remember any more complex code.

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

#372

Post by FabHK »

Nition wrote: post #278
dmitriy_ko wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus a wired landline phone is always charged, with excellent reception.

POTS (plain old telephone service) is really amazing in many ways. Huge reliability, independent of the ordinary power grid, dead simple consistent UI, etc.

(I have an IP phone at work, and it's an unintuitive unreliable beast.)

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

#373

Post by Aeolun »

addicted wrote: post #273
wild_preference wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Festivals I've been to will, say, require deposits of 100 peso increments and then the beers cost 80 pesos. And you can't get your money out. Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke. With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the…

Why can’t you load the same amount of money on your bracelet before the festival as the cash you would be carrying? If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money. I’ve been to a festival which allowed us to withdraw money freely (I think they had some restrictions such as only 1…

I think my problem with this comes down to ‘why the fuck are you bothering me with this?!’. We have perfectly valid working payment systems (cash, debit/credit), and for some reason you’ve decided that your festivals proprietary payment system is better?

Have to load money, have to retrieve money, and have zero insight into how much I’ve already spent without even more apps or interfaces.

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

#374

Post by Aeolun »

XorNot wrote: post #312
greglindahl wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some friends who find that they budget much more successfully when they use only cash... they can see exactly what they have left this week or month.

"Because I lack mental discipline a technology must be bad" This is an argument in the same vein as any number of self-assured blog posts which do the rounds through HN of "Why I stopped using X" and "Y considered harmful". Power to your friends maybe, but it's not an argument one way or another over the merits of the system - its an argument about things they do personally to ensure self-discipline.

Everything else being equal. If one payment system helps you budget better, then it’s clearly better than the other.

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

#375

Post by ars »

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 was traveling in the middle of nowhere once, and planned to arrive at a particular gas station before they closed (at 10PM). I was delayed and was low on gas when I pulled into the only gas station for miles around.

It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.

So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.

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

#376

Post by Operyl »

clubm8 wrote: post #281
sethhochberg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one. Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choo…

> You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. I wonder how many make theirs 1234

A lot of POS systems capable of this don’t allow seqential or repeating digits.

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

#377

Post by Aeolun »

sizzle wrote: post #291
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.

Until you run out of cash on hand or it gets lost or stolen....

If it does, you go to the bank and get more cash.

If your card gets stolen however, you go to the bank, fill out a ton of forms, pay a fee for losing your card. Wait a few days for your new card to be delivered in the mail. And then, finally can you pay again. In the meanwhile, you are forced to pay with... cash! Which nobody accepts, because not having a debit card is socially unacceptable in our society.

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

#378

Post by ars »

nvarsj wrote: post #221
samontar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s anti-fraud to stop someone from stealing your card and using it elsewhere. You can usually pre-empt that by informing the bank of travel.

Anti-fraud is done for the bank's benefit, with little incentive to prevent false positives. In my own experience, 100% of my blocked transactions have been false over the last few years (since I moved out of the US, where fraud is more rampant). It's extremely annoying - it's my money, but I can't use it because the bank is being overly conservative.

And my bank blocked 3 fraudulent transaction for me just yesterday. I still have my card, and I had not used it online.

No idea how they got the number.

But it does actually work sometimes.

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

#379

Post by FabHK »

gammateam wrote: post #215
CPLX wrote: post #14

A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.

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.

That's presumably not what a central bank concerned about access to central bank cash has in mind. I had to chuckle about this part of the article:

> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.

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

#380

Post by fiblye »

CPLX wrote: post #14

A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.

Furthermore, a society that relies on digital payments is a society that would collapse with a week long blackout. A couple targeted power plant attacks would be enough to completely destroy the economy. That's terrifying.
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