Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #46

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.

You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level. That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work. You're welcome.

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by nbsd4life » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

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…

If you've ever been on the bad side of banks you'll dread this a lot. I merely had my credit card stolen but getting a replacement was surprisingly time-consuming and I'm glad I could still eat and travel until then.

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

#53

Post by tjoff » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #47

tjoff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but unfortunately I don't believe a society being run by humans would ever implement that. The leaders will not tolerate that kind of loss of control.

It has already been implemented (Bitcoin, Monero etc), and is improving gradually. The control freaks who would not like to tolerate it think they'll be able to tame it, but Bitcoin is like the Hydra - it gets stronger with every unsuccessful attack attempt. It's better for them to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist in order to not bring attention to it. When they eventually lift their heads ou…

Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor untraceable. Replacing cash with bitcoin would be a nightmare.

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

#54

Post by hk__2 » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

ersiees wrote: post #10

hannasanarion wrote: post #7

Why does there need to be a separate government issued digital currency? Presumably all of the private accounts that people are currently using are measured in Kr already, and the banks already operate at fractional reserve so the actual paper doesn't exist. As an American, I make about one cash purchase a year, but that doesn't mean that I'm not spending US Dollars. It seems to me that calling digital money "e-krona…

It changes the value fluctuations. Right now the biggest problem with using crypto as your day to day money is that you cannot trust the money that you put into crypto to stay at the same value over time + transactions are slow.

> Right now the biggest problem with using crypto as your day to day money is that you cannot trust the money that you put into crypto to stay at the same value over time

Isn’t that a problem you have with any currency?

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

#55

Post by upofadown » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

The 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

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

#56

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

> Life is just better without cash.

Even if you believe that, allowing private for-profit businesses (banks, credit card companies) to skim a percentage off of every single monetary transaction to line the pockets of their shareholders is utterly grotesque. It amounts to a mandatory tax, except none of the tax is going to the benefit of the taxed.

At a minimum, a reasonable cashless society would require monetary transactions to be done at zero profit and with strong regulation requiring financial institutions to minimize the cost to the seller and buyer.

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

#57

Post by pishpash » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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

#58

Post by sparkie » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #46

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.

You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level. That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work. You're welcome.

Another false comparison. There's a big difference between implementing society-wide regulations and unpersoning individuals.

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

#59

Post by tjoff » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:53 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #33

tjoff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the main point of an e-krona is exactly to try and reduce that risk. One of the proposed goals is to have non-traceable transactions. Seems unrealistic to me but that would be the holy grail.

We have known how to do untraceable* transactions [0] since 1982. There has now been thirty years of cryptographic research building on these results. The reason it hasn't happened is not because we can't do it but because governments resist the additional privacy protections. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash * - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides…

Yeah, politically unrealistic is what I meant.

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

#60

Post by ploggingdev » Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless?

I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.