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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

#151

Post by bouncycastle »

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.

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, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.

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

#152

Post by walshemj »

jamesblonde wrote: post #17

As a resident of Sweden, i can only say that this is the future for all western countries. Life is just better without cash. We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center. Your phone is enough to get you through the day. The govt is still run by the people for the people here, so most people aren't worried about totalitarianism. Most beggars now have signs wit…

The mental tax of having £100 in your wallet? this is hardly a serious problem for most people.

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

#153

Post by stale2002 »

pishpash wrote: post #64
api wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Self sufficiency is a continuum, not a boolean. Cash decentralizes permission for economic transactions.

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 broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.

And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.

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.

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

#155

Post by eigenvector »

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.

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

#156

Post by xrd »

kristofferR wrote: post #120
xrd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, would your colleagues consider using bitcoin or ethereum as a method of exchange? Could you send them that to pay them back and they could pay on your behalf? If not, why? edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!

My "music festival colleagues"? :P Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea. If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly…

Got it, none of your friends or people you know there are using it.

Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no.

It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration.

It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.

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

#157

Post by StavrosK »

masklinn wrote: post #125
StavrosK wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but that doesn't weaken his point.

It removes the entire second paragraph. It takes about 5mn to do a SEPA bank transfer: open banking client, open transfers, create new transfer, enter destination IBAN, enter amount, optionally set a data & some text, confirm.

Which is much longer than handing someone a 10 euro note.

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

#158

Post by protomyth »

CydeWeys wrote: post #19
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.

And you might be leery of criticizing any of these entities lest they withdraw your ability to do any of these things. That's a serious chilling effect.

Its a fear that shows up in a common interpretation of Revelation 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. This is one of the verses in the Bible that tends to drive a lot of the hatred for national ids and removal of cash in the US.

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

#159

Post by StavrosK »

Casseres wrote: post #126
StavrosK wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't necessarily need a connection. It can work just as well with a QR code signature that the recipient uses later to broadcast the transaction.

Without the network, another recipient wouldn't know about that transaction and thus be susceptible to a double-spend, right?

You'd have to transmit it before the client can double-spend, yes, but my point is that it's not necessary for the owner of the coins to have an internet connection.

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

#160

Post by samontar »

bouncycastle wrote: post #151
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.

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…

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.
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