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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

#471

Post by beefield »

Aeolun wrote: post #373
addicted wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> why the fuck are you bothering me with this?

Handling cash is a hassle in many ways:

1. It's slow. Obviously it is not slow in the best case when the customer throws in the exact change, but it is _really_ slow in the probably more typical case when the drunkard is at the counter and starts to dig into the pockets and find out if he has enough coins or when the seventh customer in the row wants to pay his ten cent lollipop with a hundred dollar bill and you run out of change.

2. It ties capital to keep sufficient amount of change in all of the booths.

3. It is difficult/expensive to manage securely and safely. You need to figure out how to stop personnel and other people stealing the money. Also your personnel likely feels more safe when they know that nobody can think that hey can come and try to steal money from you because you simply have none.

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

#472

Post by aidenn0 »

angry_octet wrote: post #268
protomyth wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I remember that too; my grandfather used to go on business trips to NYC, and after adjusting for inflation the amount he carried was almost 5000 USD. Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.

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

#473

Post by kadendogthing »

gsich wrote: post #414
chrismcb wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart phones today have a long way to go before they come even close to perfect

You can already see that manufacturers have a hard time to come up with new features. Stuff like thinner devices (nobody cares or wants this to a certain degree, compared to a better battery life), 3+ cameras, notches because for some reason you can't integrate speakers behind the display. "AI" stuff that doesn't work when you're offline. I would trade all this shit for a week battery time. So yes, while smartphones…

>nobody cares or wants this to a certain degree, compared to a better battery life

Then why do consumers constantly praise thinner phones, and continue to purchase them? I think you're mistaking what you want and consider a good choice compared to what everyone else actually wants and is willing to support.

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

#474

Post by fotbr »

jstanley wrote: post #302
paulie_a wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do an incorrect inventory. Some venues let workers do inventory and reporting. They are charging for the cup itself and that is how they determine sales. If a stack of cups disappears, there is no reconciliation. Music venues have some interesting procedures, Alpine valley allows under an oz of weed to be brought in. They have college girls carrying backpacks with 40k in cash. There is an off duty cop directly b…

Can you elaborate on that second paragraph? I don't understand how those things are related to each other. Why do they allow weed to be brought in? Why do they have college girls carrying cash in a backpack? Why so much cash? Why is there an off-duty cop following her around? Isn't an off-duty cop just an ordinary member of the public? If a cop is required shouldn't it be an on -duty cop? If it's somehow a trap to ca…

Back in HS I worked at an amusement park for a summer. On a busy night, if I closed the booth, I'd be walking out the park's employee exit around 2am, through a somewhat busy and not-very-well-lit public area of the parking lot, and across to the admin offices with 30k+ in a plastic bag. That was not an uncommon amount for most of the non-token booths, and having 16-18 year old kids carrying it out of the park to the admin building was also common, since that was most of the park's work force.

I'd guess the "college girls carrying 40k in cash in a backpack" were employees carrying cash out from whatever business/booth they were running and taking it to their bank or head office or whatnot, and the "off-duty" cop behind them was there acting as a security guard; since that's a somewhat common side gig for cops, and in may places, they're still given all the power and authority an "on duty" cop has.

I don't get the connection to the weed (legal or otherwise, it has never been an interest of mine), but perhaps it explains the other bit.

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

#475

Post by gammateam »

stale2002 wrote: post #350
gammateam wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lightning + Watchtowers it's coming Just another 18 month from now and I'm sure it will be finished. I myself need to pay for food right now and I do not have time to wait for a solution that is perpetually years from completion.

Lightning is available now. The 18 months meme was regarding when it wasn't.

If you want to perpetuate that criticism, you'll need up to date arguments: Lightning is cumbersome to use and impractical because of the requirement to run a personal full node to connect to AND your device running the payment channel needs to always ben online for the duration of the payment channel. "Watchtowers" solve both of these issues, and they have not proliferated yet.

Yes, this isn't about what you need right now, use cash or a financial network using intermediaries. We are operating on different time frames and most forward thinking things we are talking about are on that time frame. Nobody in this movement is perturbed by your astute observation that it isn't available right now, nobody is saying "well pack it up boys, stale2002 can't be accommodated, shows over"

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

#476

Post by dumbfoundded »

I'll repost an old comment of mine:

"The scariest part to me about cryptocurrency is not the greed, lies and manipulation. It's a centralized cryptocurrency by a major government. Imagine if instead of cash, you had to pay for everything with a digital currency controlled by the US Govt. It'd be all the immutability of cryptocurrency with the monetary policy of the Fed Reserve. I'd bet the IRS and NSA would love the additional data."

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

#477

Post by ballenf »

jacobush wrote: post #359
exikyut wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It did?

https://youtu.be/lqDhWTgOAiY

Captain is handed a manual when plant life is discovered. Took him a second to stop talking to the book and start using his hands on the pages. It was a pretty quick scene, but humorous.

Side note, the Wall-E short is great and one of the best Pixar shorts, imo.

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

#478

Post by nickpsecurity »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #452
sumedh wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you go to the bank and get more cash. Not sure which country you are talking about but the vast majority of people go to an ATM not the bank to get cash. You still need a debit card to get cash from an ATM.

In my country I can withdraw cash from the machine as I pay for shopping at the supermarket. And I'm not saying I withdraw cash then pay. I pay with the card AND the cash I withdrew comes out after the transaction is complete. I haven't been to a bank for getting cash in 10 years. And as you say, ATMs are where you get cash.

We can do that here in the Mid-South, too. Got a story you might like. The customer, service desk which allows some cash back for free was packed. So, I had to go to register with something to buy. I tried to minimize the cost overall for a $500 withdraw at a company with $100 max per transaction. I hit their self checkout. I did five orders on the machine each with a single grape. Each order was one cent plus $100 cash back. Total transaction cost was five cents.

Self-checkout person was going "what the hell?" on that one. I also heard her talking to others about being hungry from break being delayed. I gave her the grapes after explaining what I was doing. She was happy, too. Probably did it herself at some point haha. Cashiers trip out to this day if I tell them about that whenever someone is buying a candy bar or something to get cash back. Occasionally, person in line leaves to get a grape. Just one. :)

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

#479

Post by Gatsky »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #346
o-o- wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the condition persists even few days it becomes a major problem How much cash does a person keep handy? If the condition persists a few days, cash would also become a major problem.

Such as when the Irish banks went on strike for about 6 months in the 70s. Edit: It was a lockout not a strike. They survived using olde worlde approaches with no loss of GDP growth or retail sales. The retailers and local pubs operated as banks and managed the movement of IOU credits and cheques. Publicans, as it turned out, were a pretty good gauge of credit-worthiness and extent. Cheques ended up counter signed do…

Fascinating and an excellent point, thanks.

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

#480

Post by Gatsky »

cf498 wrote: post #383

I was really shocked when i experienced the same issue in the Netherlands. I went there for a conference and only had to go straight to Amsterdam central, to science park and to my hotel in almere central. I had to exit Amsterdam central station by scanning in the QR code of my paper ticket. The alarm at that station was ringing constantly because of all the foreign tourists who had no idea what to do. Outside I had…

Landing in the US for a very short trip I didn’t want to draw cash out (and have to store the notes for the next trip or change them back to local currency), and so I couldn’t tip people that needed to be tipped. Then I tried drawing cash from an ATM and couldn’t anyway.

I mean, everyone has a story about how they were disadvantaged by a particular system.

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