Cash is king.
Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
171–180 of 628 posts
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
« Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys » It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world,…
>> users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#173It would only be acceptable if the cashless society supported both anonymity. It's the only way to avoid discrimination and enforce fairness.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if your phone dies or is lost or stolen, how do you pay for food with no phone? How do you even buy a replacement phone if you have no phone to pay with?
If you lose your wallet how do you pay for food with no wallet? This is a false line of argument.
The staff in the local branch of our bank know who we are without asking (no, this isn't because we're particularly good customers, just regulars)
I can just go up to the counter and ask to withdraw some of my money and (against my signature) they'll hand it over. No ID required, really handy if you've mislaid your wallet.
I realise this one can't really scale (!) but it is definitely a nice feature.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#175Isn't china's cashless move bearing similar problems?
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#176As 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…
As someone who' seen both the cashless and society with cash. The cash one is better.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#177Earlier 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.
There doesn't need to be a rationale or incentive. It's electronics combined with software. At some point it will shut off or break down, probably at a time most inopportune.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#178The article failed to give any real detail about what is being proposed. I suspect it would have to be something like Taler[1] where the buyer is anonymous but the seller is not. That allows the collection of sales taxes and allows the government some control over the currency. [1] https://taler.net/en/index.html
Note that the article is about Sweden, which has a VAT, not a sales tax. One great property of VATs is that they encourage reporting.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#179Do dope dealers and brothels accept Apple Pay, or do people somehow get US dollar cash for those expenses?
I have heard about pushers using mobile payment services. Some even advertise their business on facebook.
Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
#180I'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…
That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use…
There’s a big club in NYC that does this (Brooklyn Mirage), except they link your credit card to the bracelet and you don’t have to load credit.
Makes the lines for drinks move so fast, it’s really outstanding.