A shame that this took the threat of war to be taken seriously, rather than the reality of disenfranchisement faced by the elderly, immigrants, the homeless and the unbanked for whom cash remains a lifeline.
It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
The tax service here takes money laundering quite seriously so there's been a lot of regulation added for businesses handling cash, most affecting is probably the requirements of "certified tellers" that shot up the price for many smaller businesses (some even closing down or just switching to Swish).
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
The rules for laundering - know your customer - are ridiculous, governments don't need to turn banks in quasi-state actors to squash laundering if they really wanted to stop it.
Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.
Sweden still feels very cashless in practice. My barber went back from swish to cash because of the charges for businesses but that is the only non-swish/non-card shopping I do these days and my haircut is literally the only thing I’ve paid cash for since well before covid. Even market stalls etc take swish. I never carry cash on me normally. It has made life much better. There is a small number - less in real life than on the comments on the internet to be honest - people lamenting the decline of cash but the vast vast majority completely don’t miss cash.
"An ongoing audit of the hairdressing industry that the Swedish Tax Agency is currently conducting shows that virtually all hairdressing companies audited by the authority are involved in some form of tax evasion [...] The most common tax avoidance discovered in the audits of around fifty hairdressing companies so far is undeclared income"
In Germany we like to mimic things from other western countries a lot. Especially the nordics (including Sweden) and the US. Problem, we do this with a delay of 5-10 years. Right now we are in the transformation process of becoming cashless.. Like our role model Sweden. Hmm, something feels wrong.. :-)
If that means businesses will accept a card without grumbling (or at all) I'm all for it. Feels strange to come from a supposedly less-developed country to Germany and having to pay cash.
Germany is also still waiting if 4G or Fibre internet to homes are a good thing... Or if the government should use the internet to make things easier for their citizens.
This isn't the worst practice, however. Wait for the early adopters to test new ideas and implement the best ones. Maybe the cashless rollout in Germany might be curbed now.
Sure, that would be good, but that's not how Germany does it. Germany looks at the early adopters, doesn't wait, but needs 5-10 years for execution and then cannot revert it anymore, because so many parties are involved implementing this.
It isn't mimicking as such, it's your federal government signing up to various international agreements on everything under the sun. The international agreement in question here is called "the Fourth Industrial Revolution", and you can bet they're all in on it. Just like they are with Digital ID, ID gated internet and so on.
Western governments have a tendency to try and change their publics rather than be changed by the public. They even have a name for it, "psychological nudging".
Any "central payment system"(like e.g. obsession with Paypal)
is a single-point-of-failure vulnerability. Cash is decentralized
and independent of any technology failing.
people find this the hard way during electric blackouts,
that credit cards are useless without electricity, but somehow
still think "electronic payment" is worth completely switching over.
So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.
It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.
This doesn't help that much because cash today is also useless without electricity. You can't go to a bank anymore to get cash from an actual person. The machines run on electricity.
That's a fair point to make that for 90% of us we get cash from a machine that requires electricity.
It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.
To say cash today is "independent of any technology" which is what I replied to simply isn't true anymore. Read more carefully what the discussion is about please.
Imagine becoming a dissident in a totalitarian society where you can be cut off from all commercial transactions with the click of a button (i.e. cash has a broader purpose).
You don’t have to imagine; it has been done many times now against dissidents in the USA through the never before crossed lines of “debanking” in the partial digital currency American economy, the tyrannical cases of the EU sanctioning and effectively turning Jacques Baud and Hüseyin Doğru into 1984 style unpersons, the even more abusive and seemingly tyrants’ template in the targeting of Martin Sellner, where the EU has been targeting him personally across even non-member states in the most tyrannical way. And there are several other smaller, less prominent cases.
As you described, one click cut off from commercial transactions and in the cases of the EU sanctioning its own citizens where even helping them feed themselves or their children is an illegal act.
And most people are totally oblivious to most of these massive shifts in the fundamental assumptions of democratic society, and may even support the tyranny they presumably must believe will never be turned on them, even though no one knows more what a loathsome person a traitor is than those who the traitor has served in his betrayal.
Funny thing is, a good way of making someone hover their finger over that button is to try to deposit any significant amount of cash to your bank account. One part of the system says "Use cash!", another part says "What is this cash? How did you get it? From whom? Did you give them a receipt? Can you prove that?"
If "the electronics" break down, shops usually can't accept any form of payment at all, because that would be illegal with their on-line cash registers being offline...
Say, hypothetically, I'm a farmer with 2,000ha of barley at 3.3 tonne per ha, are you actually planning on paying $2 million in cash for 6,600 tonne to make beer?
Or are you thinking more of a "farmer" as someone selling individual artisan carrots?
The ICC is just a made up organization - it only has power, like any international entity, to the extent that it can utilize that power. With countries such as China, Russia, and the United States not being signatories to the ICC if the ICC were to, oh, idk, prosecute Xi Jingping for the genocide of Uighur Muslims China would also execute similar actions as the US or Israel.
And even in cases like Maduro who is a wanted criminal and I believe would be easily proven to have committed crimes against humanity, the lack of public indictment and backlash against the United States for bringing that piece of shit to justice discredits the ICC. It can’t be an organization where it applies universal human rights declarations only when Israel is involved. That’s stupid and that’s exactly why the organization is a failure.
But if we are going to view the government as the enemy in this context and thus cash is a way to avoid “control” it also follows that the same are espousing avoidance of paying taxes and the control government and taxes have over you as well.
It’s interesting to see folks talking about the “disadvantaged” such as immigrants (presumably illegal because legal immigrants have varying levels of bank access) who of course deserve to use cash as a moral imperative against the totalitarian government but then if someone says well I disagree with and don’t want to pay taxes (give me cash) because of that same anti-totalitarian point of view they’d be labeled all sorts of negative things like being a non-contributor or something similar.
We have to align on consistent moral claims. If you want to argue well so and so is part of the totalitarian government apparatus then all you are doing is creating an “other” who uses cash to avoid “totalitarianism” and in which case the so-called “totalitarian” apparatus is justified in its hostility toward entities which seek to destroy it.
Sorry I will decline to provide specific examples. This is common knowledge. You can read about things that the Chinese authoritarian government does, you can search in Google for things like China’s social credit score, and more.
I was debanked about 26 years ago. I had one too many issues with returned bad checks, and a report was filed with an agency called ChexSystems. For years afterwards, I was prohibited from holding a legitimate checking account anywhere in the US.
Col. Jacques Baud is living it right now. He's been cut off from his pension and bank accounts completely in Belgium and is prohibited from crossing borders.
how can you be prohibited from crossing schengen border when there is nobody to check you? he should have no problem to get to switzerland/germany border crossing
also article you link:
"It is unclear if Baud is a resident of Switzerland."
so not sure why he should be returning to switzerland
It is happening in the EU right now. Martin Sellner has denied or closed by 109 banks for his opinion that Europe should stay European.
Prophecy: some people here may argue that's a good thing, and we should differentiate between a good and bad debanking.
Edit: as expected, if you want to push for more autocracy and control, you need to find the right bogeyman. And suddenly, people claiming they are liberal and pro freedom will start supporting authoritarian policies, but "just in some cases", whether those people are terrorists, "far rights" or paedophiles.
A cursory look up of the dude very quickly turned up links with far-right terrorist and Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, including receiving money from him, so I don't think it's the "opinion" that's the issue.
Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.
*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror
banks declined to do business with him (and/or with the movement he is associated with) not for "his opinion", but for his actions
IMHO it's obvious that there should be a limited minimum/basic account provided by the state unconditionally, and that the current practice of using AML regulations to effectively ban people from having bank cards and bank accounts goes against the spirit of due process.
it's quite farcical that private banks are used as mandatory designated sin-eaters (scapegoats) for this. they don't want to and mostly can't comment on the specifics (because SAR - suspicious activity reporting - and the various national equivalents, usually immediately triggers the requirement to play dumb, since that's the only way to ensure that the bank cannot be later dragged in front of whatever authority for not cooperating with the investigation) but everyone knows it, since it's in the fucking news.
and the actual legal actions tend to be overturned.
all of which in total end up helping these organizations (and these politicians) to farm reputation.
Banks are also afraid of repercussions from US if they have customers that are on some US list, refer to case of Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC)
The headline is preposterous. The article itself says less than 5 percent people used cash last year compared to 10% 2023. How is that abandoning its cashless society? The only thing is the government asking people to have roughly a $100 worth of cash at home for emergencies like total blackouts.
Yup, its nonsense, nobody to very few is going back to cash but may keep some cash at home as recommended. I've actually had $100 in my wallet for 3 years that I haven't used because I never pay with cash, sold a table to an american couple and they didn't have Swish.
Quote from article: 'It all changed when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Realising that reliance on an electronic payment system left Sweden vulnerable to blackouts or sabotage, the Riksbank – Sweden's central bank – urged civilians to keep 1,000 Swedish kronor (£80) per adult at home. The government issued a brochure entitled "If Crisis or War Comes" to every household, advising Swedes to use cash regularly to "strengthen preparedness".'
Netherlands recommends 70 euro per adult and 30 euro per child. There's probably some coordination going on between countries that they all land on roughly the same ammount of money.
They co-ordinate most things now, rightly or wrongly.
Either way these are small change, and thanks to the slow but persistent reduction, many places refuse to accept cash and/or don't even have the facilities to deal with it!
You should have cash in a drawer somewhere just in case you lose your card / wallet / phone. A lot of people talk about totalitarian societies and being cut off from payment at a click of a switch, but the reality is more mundane.
Cash is a good backup and is easy to give to someone else e.g. I recently moved house and my brother was driving my car (while I drove the moving van). I left £60 in cash in the cubby box, so he could refill. No need to mess around with apps/bank transfers, just leave the notes/coins in the compartment.
Being cut off from payment at a click of a switch is already happening. I can name at least 3 people off the top of my head that have been de-banked in western countries (USA, UK, Italy) simply for speaking out in favour of the "wrong" cause.
Democratic states need to constitutionally enshrine the right to banking, if they insist on being called democratic.
I think China is cashless society but not relying on internet servers. Beggars and street vendor have printed-out QR-code and no phone. You scan the code with Alipay-app and show the confirmation screen to the seller. This is not a real-time transaction. It is executed when the server is available.
Youtube-girl Qingyunji bought some water on remote mountain road using QR-on-cardboard and this is what I assume happened.
How have we even arrived to a point where all payments go through Visa/Mastercard duopoly and to pay people hectically unlock, reconnect, and reinstall stuff on their smartphones?
Cashless society in Sweden is very much built around a Swish, a local service that I don't think has much to do with Visa/Mastercard as it communicates directly with your bank.
The bank still charges 2 SEK / transaction (~$0.2). This is a free handout to the banks, which already profit from keeping your money in their books. It's also a fee that affects mostly small vendors.
On the other hand, the closest equivalent in the rest of the Nordics (Denmark/Norway/Finland) is Vipps/MobilePay, and you must have a Visa or Mastercard card to use it.
You must have a debit card, but most of these cards are BankAxept cards that happens to be dual-branded with Visa or Mastercard. At least in Norway Vipps payments go over the BankAxept network (Vipps owns BankAxept which handles 80%+ of Norwegian in-store payments and an even higher proportion of Norwegian debit card payments), not over Visa or Mastercard.
Well, I envy that. It's more depressing than in the US. Trump does "she's a nasty woman!", whereas Bolsonaro senior's level is "I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it". The son is not better. And yet they have supporters.
I am not in the US. I don't pay attention to any politics anymore. I have no ability to influence anything (I don't believe voting achieves anything) and ultimately it does no good paying attention to it.
Most EU countries have widely used alternatives. In Poland you can pay with Blik in basically every card terminal and use it intead of your card at ATM, and for online payments it serves 70% of transactions.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
And to the extent that even when you pay with cards with a Visa/Mastercard logo odds are high that it will go via a national network domestically.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Yeah Poland had national electronic direct transfers system across all banks since 90s. In 1989 we had to build the banking sector from scratch after communism so we had a chance to design it right.
Interesting because I have read that Germans traveling to Ukraine are amazed at how cashless daily life is even close to the front lines. Now Germany is a famously cash-centric society, so I am not sure what to make of that comparison.
Nevertheless it is certainly a good idea to think about fallbacks tho.
Ukraine's admin life is extremely well digitized, moreso than most developed countries. You can do pretty much anything with the Dia app. Most amazingly it's a very recent development
Funny that Sweden abandoned its 200-year neutrality and joined NATO in the name of security and yet security situation for Sweden has only deteriorated since then. Shows how short sighted and brainwashed Swedish politicians are.
To the extent the security situation has deteriorated, it has deteriorated because of a continuation of the same situation that made them join NATO. They'd not be in any better position without it.
Sweden had no problem remaining neutral through all the previous wars involving both sides, including those fought in Europe. This conflict is no different, yet for reasons that remain unclear, Sweden has chosen to make a dramatic departure from its longstanding policy of neutrality. Whether this turns out to have been a gigantic strategic blunder or the result of NATO pressure that Sweden simply couldn’t withstand remains to be seen.
It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.
A little too trusting believing that, no? Hairdressers are famous for cheating on their taxes, and cash is an excellent way to do it.
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/hairdressers-evading-ta...
"An ongoing audit of the hairdressing industry that the Swedish Tax Agency is currently conducting shows that virtually all hairdressing companies audited by the authority are involved in some form of tax evasion [...] The most common tax avoidance discovered in the audits of around fifty hairdressing companies so far is undeclared income"
I don't miss cash at all, and in many ways I will be happy if I never have to carry it on me again.
Western governments have a tendency to try and change their publics rather than be changed by the public. They even have a name for it, "psychological nudging".
It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.
It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.
I had cash and zero problems. Many had no cash and many problems.
You specifically mentioned banking as a problem and I mentioned a specific solution. Based in real life, not fantasy.
I am arguing your point and you are attacking me rather than making a point of your own.
As you described, one click cut off from commercial transactions and in the cases of the EU sanctioning its own citizens where even helping them feed themselves or their children is an illegal act.
And most people are totally oblivious to most of these massive shifts in the fundamental assumptions of democratic society, and may even support the tyranny they presumably must believe will never be turned on them, even though no one knows more what a loathsome person a traitor is than those who the traitor has served in his betrayal.
If "the electronics" break down, shops usually can't accept any form of payment at all, because that would be illegal with their on-line cash registers being offline...
Or are you thinking more of a "farmer" as someone selling individual artisan carrots?
And even in cases like Maduro who is a wanted criminal and I believe would be easily proven to have committed crimes against humanity, the lack of public indictment and backlash against the United States for bringing that piece of shit to justice discredits the ICC. It can’t be an organization where it applies universal human rights declarations only when Israel is involved. That’s stupid and that’s exactly why the organization is a failure.
All organisations are made up.
But if we are going to view the government as the enemy in this context and thus cash is a way to avoid “control” it also follows that the same are espousing avoidance of paying taxes and the control government and taxes have over you as well.
It’s interesting to see folks talking about the “disadvantaged” such as immigrants (presumably illegal because legal immigrants have varying levels of bank access) who of course deserve to use cash as a moral imperative against the totalitarian government but then if someone says well I disagree with and don’t want to pay taxes (give me cash) because of that same anti-totalitarian point of view they’d be labeled all sorts of negative things like being a non-contributor or something similar.
We have to align on consistent moral claims. If you want to argue well so and so is part of the totalitarian government apparatus then all you are doing is creating an “other” who uses cash to avoid “totalitarianism” and in which case the so-called “totalitarian” apparatus is justified in its hostility toward entities which seek to destroy it.
Col. Jacques Baud is living it right now. He's been cut off from his pension and bank accounts completely in Belgium and is prohibited from crossing borders.
So he can't even return to Switzerland.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/former-swiss-in...
also article you link: "It is unclear if Baud is a resident of Switzerland."
so not sure why he should be returning to switzerland
NYT: https://archive.ph/pkJYp
Prophecy: some people here may argue that's a good thing, and we should differentiate between a good and bad debanking.
Edit: as expected, if you want to push for more autocracy and control, you need to find the right bogeyman. And suddenly, people claiming they are liberal and pro freedom will start supporting authoritarian policies, but "just in some cases", whether those people are terrorists, "far rights" or paedophiles.
Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.
*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror
IMHO it's obvious that there should be a limited minimum/basic account provided by the state unconditionally, and that the current practice of using AML regulations to effectively ban people from having bank cards and bank accounts goes against the spirit of due process.
it's quite farcical that private banks are used as mandatory designated sin-eaters (scapegoats) for this. they don't want to and mostly can't comment on the specifics (because SAR - suspicious activity reporting - and the various national equivalents, usually immediately triggers the requirement to play dumb, since that's the only way to ensure that the bank cannot be later dragged in front of whatever authority for not cooperating with the investigation) but everyone knows it, since it's in the fucking news.
and the actual legal actions tend to be overturned.
all of which in total end up helping these organizations (and these politicians) to farm reputation.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/entry-ban-for-austrian-...
Either way these are small change, and thanks to the slow but persistent reduction, many places refuse to accept cash and/or don't even have the facilities to deal with it!
Cash is a good backup and is easy to give to someone else e.g. I recently moved house and my brother was driving my car (while I drove the moving van). I left £60 in cash in the cubby box, so he could refill. No need to mess around with apps/bank transfers, just leave the notes/coins in the compartment.
Democratic states need to constitutionally enshrine the right to banking, if they insist on being called democratic.
Youtube-girl Qingyunji bought some water on remote mountain road using QR-on-cardboard and this is what I assume happened.
Brazil has Pix. Though if Bolsonaro wins the election he'll sell the financial system to the US, even though Brazilians love Pix.
These are not fringe payment systems, either. They're really big where they are.
EU is working on something similar, and I think it's launched in a couple of countries.
We're literally in the middle of the election Bolsonaro is winning.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Nevertheless it is certainly a good idea to think about fallbacks tho.