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Swedes turn against cashlessness

theguardian.com

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Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#121

Post by LinusPrime »

nv-vn wrote: post #76

Wow. No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is? They're not just talking about eliminating cash, they want to nationalize all private banking. They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies, that private firms cannot be trusted to manage financial transactions despite the massive history proving they can, and that the state is somehow going to be able to handle t…

It is much easier to fight against a corrupt state than a corrupt conglomerate of private entities; at least the prior has the assumed ethos that its democratic and has the peoples' interest in mind.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#122

Post by mapgrep »

nv-vn wrote: post #76

Wow. No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is? They're not just talking about eliminating cash, they want to nationalize all private banking. They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies, that private firms cannot be trusted to manage financial transactions despite the massive history proving they can, and that the state is somehow going to be able to handle t…

>The state is anti-innovation

Let's look at "innovation" in consumer banking:

-Debit and credit cards physically show numbers that give full access to the accounts 40 years after modern public key cryptography was invented

-A very modest improvement to this system, known as PIN and chip, came to the U.S. recently after years in Europe and Asia; the Wall Street Journal has called this very basic change a "nightmare" more than a year into implementation, doubling average transaction times to 13 seconds (!!) in an informal test. Only 28 percent of merchants supported the technology.

-Checks physically show numbers that give full access to accounts

-The standard consumer "friendly" way of moving money electronically, ACH, involves banks FTP-ing massive text files to one another, batch processing them overnight, and clearing transactions in 24 hours or more.

-There is no used standard for peer to peer consumer electronic transfer

-Massive data breaches by banks have become incredibly common

-The response to endemic fraud is to revoke cards and mail new ones and/or to repair and monitor credit on an ad hoc basis

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#123

Post by naasking »

nv-vn wrote: post #76

Wow. No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is? They're not just talking about eliminating cash, they want to nationalize all private banking. They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies, that private firms cannot be trusted to manage financial transactions despite the massive history proving they can, and that the state is somehow going to be able to handle t…

> The state is anti-innovation (think about how slowly government infrastructure has developed) and anti-consumer (imagine the DMV in charge of your money).

That some states are anti-innovation does not entail that all states, or even most states, are anti-innovation. Government dysfunction is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that, a pervasive cultural belief that government is dysfunctional leads to a dysfunctional government, and the converse is also true.

Which isn't to say this is a good idea anyway, but your counterpoint isn't all that strong.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#124

Post by AnthonyMouse »

notahacker wrote: post #86
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the new addition of Pay Wave where you can simply tap a card on a sensor, I do not see how paying with cash and then waiting for the teller to sort of the bills and provide the right change can be faster. Have you seen the automated checkouts a lot of stores are installing? There is no cashier. You scan your items and insert bills in the slot. The change is calculated by a computer and returned immediately.

This still takes more time than touching a wallet to a sensor

> This still takes more time than touching a wallet to a sensor

How? The machines will literally take an entire stack of bills at once, read them and make change in the same time it takes to verify an electronic transaction.

You would need a stopwatch with sub-second precision to even tell the difference. Which one is faster is down more to the specific model of payment processing machine than the payment method.

And even if the card was theoretically faster, we're no longer talking about waiting for some high school kid to fumble around for 30 seconds. A difference of 300 milliseconds one way or the other is just pedantry.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#125

Post by rahikainen »

xtrapolate wrote: post #116
nv-vn wrote: post #76

Wow. No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is? They're not just talking about eliminating cash, they want to nationalize all private banking. They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies, that private firms cannot be trusted to manage financial transactions despite the massive history proving they can, and that the state is somehow going to be able to handle t…

> "No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is?" Lucky you're here! > "The state is anti-innovation" Not in Sweden, it isn't. Ad hominem all the way. > "They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies" There are examples in recent history that support this model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Israel_bank_stock_crisis

"Not in Sweden, it isn't. Ad hominem all the way."

Maybe innovative in importing rapists and terrorists. Yeah job well done.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#126

Post by camillomiller »

ciocan42 wrote: post #20

From what I've seen here in London (UK), mostly tourists use cash. Everybody else uses contactless payments. You can pay with contactless cards or apple/android pay on the public transport or on your corner grocery store. And with the new fin-tech banks like Monzo, Starling or Revolut the banking apps are light years ahead of traditional banks.

Which means the amount of control over our movements and transactions is also multiplied nth-fold. This is more of my concern than any mishandling of the payment process, considering that is all information an overreaching State actor can always use to spy on us.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#127

Post by ricardobeat »

brownbat wrote: post #89
staplers wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cashless transactions require a third party Cryptocurrency.. (miners are decentralized and don't require you to trust them)

The network is still the third party. With cash, or bottle caps, or any physical token, all you need are two people that agree it has value. Possession is the ledger.

The network can still run between those two people alone (if consolidation is solved).

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#128

Post by kojeovo »

staplers wrote: post #77
mfringel wrote: post #31

Cashless transactions require a third party to give permission for the transaction, typically in real-time. It's completely normal to be "basically okay" with that... I use cards/apps to pay on a regular basis. However, it's a long haul between "okay with cashless transactions being a popular payment method", and "eliminating cash."

Cashless transactions require a third party Cryptocurrency.. (miners are decentralized and don't require you to trust them)

Transactions still have to be approved by the network. ATM it's pretty slow. And many coins have one pool with majority of the hash rate --> not so decentralized

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#129

Post by jstanley »

DanBC wrote: post #118
jstanley wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's de facto the same in most shops. If you pick up some goods and walk out of the shop leaving some cash on the counter... what recourse do they have? OK, the shop might not be happy about it, but you owe them the value of goods, and you've paid them in legal tender to the correct amount.

In England that's theft. This is clear and unambiguous. See for example thean who took cash from his company safe, and replaced the same value a week later, but who was convicted of theft because the notes were different. See R v Velyumi here: https://www.lawteacher.net/cases/theft-cases.php

Replacing it a week later is quite different to leaving the cash before you've left the shop.

Taking cash from a safe is also quite different to taking goods that are explicitly for sale. Especially if you gave them the right amount of money.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#130

Post by EastLondonCoder »

ciocan42 wrote: post #20

From what I've seen here in London (UK), mostly tourists use cash. Everybody else uses contactless payments. You can pay with contactless cards or apple/android pay on the public transport or on your corner grocery store. And with the new fin-tech banks like Monzo, Starling or Revolut the banking apps are light years ahead of traditional banks.

I also almost always use contactless payments here. But there is one big exception. When paying in a small business such as on off license or small cafe/restaurant I will go out of my way to use cash because I want the business to keep the full margin instead of paying a visa fee.
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