They promote a view where cash is inefficiënt and an enabler for crime. Which is true, if you put the right glasses on.
Unfortunately, these right glasses assume a few things: Banks get a fee for every payment, even if capped in th EU. Money should move from people to businesses, between businesses, or back to people, but not really between people. The governement gets to decide who is allowed to get money. Each of these is scary.
In Belgium,a country with a huge amiunt of electronic payments, a lot of ATMs got 'optimized' away, to the point that you had to go to a city to get cash. This caused backlash and avfew are coming back, but eternally empty.
I saw someone start a grassroots action where she sold books as a non bussiness for a few days. She decided to make it easy and go cashless. She sold 20 and then got her account flagged for suspicious activity.
When the governement feels like it, e.g. when a partner dies, they sometimes block your bank account for a few months until they know how much taxes they deserve. Hope you have cash.
I see how USA payment networks make paying for porn hard, and they are not allowed to decide where I should spend money. They also sell data to whoever wants it, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Not everyone needs to know my political affiliations as expressed by payments to causes.
I'm fine with being 90% cashless, but 100% is a nightmare.
I try to get an €2 coin to give my child a physical weekly allowance. Also, the trash bin only accepts an €1 coin. Supermarkets have cards asking customers for spare coins. They don't give them back unless they really have to.
Supermarkets and ATMs do give €50 easily, its everything below that becomes hard to get. So I hoard everything else, so do most other people, and bad money starts driving out good money in an unexpected way.
How the h*ll was cashless supposed to be a utopia, anyway? Were people fantasizing that "cashless" somehow meant a post-scarcity society, where everyone had infinite money?
And was big business quietly pushing the idea, figuring that "cashless" would help them rake a percentage off every transaction, while encouraging even more people to overspend and go into debt?
A decent barrier to street crime - which, yes, does push emotional buttons. But now-obviously at the expense of facilitating non-street crime, and "non-profit" attacks on computerized infrastructure.
> ...my local cafe pays...
Might I ask your nation? Here (USA, SE Michigan) quite a few businesses advertise discounts (often ~3%) for paying with cash - because of the fees raked off by the card companies.
Cash logistics typically cost much more than credit card fees no matter where you are located [0]. In the US, explicit cash deposit fees are typically only at ~0.1-0.3% (as a consumer you don't see these but check out a business fee schedule), but there's a lot more that goes into cash logistics, including transport, the risk of counterfeiting, internal and external theft, etc.
Cash discounts in the US are mostly a way to encourage the customer to collude in tax evasion. It's not an actual comparison of costs.
I don't know about utopia but I leave the house with just my smartphone.
And transactions costs for cash are higher than using a card or smartphone- this is what pushed banks to push for plastic in the first place.
The reality is that we are at a point were most people use cash only for criminal transactions or evading the tax man. Including myself- I pay the cleaning lady in cash because of her immigration status.
> In recent years the central bank has been working on its own digital currency, the “e-krona”, as cash declines.
Digital currency from a bank sounds like the worst from both - bank world and crypto world. Are people really so obsessed with having everything in their smartphones? I never had an urge to "pay with a smartphone".
> Are people really so obsessed with having everything in their smartphones? I never had an urge to "pay with a smartphone".
I see these types of comments around HN a lot -
what's your point? Anything useful to you personally has value and that everything else must be stupid?
One time I misplaced my wallet before a flight (it fell off my desk into a position that camouflaged perfectly with its surroundings. Even after I got home from the trip it took me a day before I spotted it). Thanks to the ability to pay with a smartphone I was still able to go on my trip with no problem. I don't do it often, but I was grateful that I had the ability to in that situation.
My argument goes deeper actually. Every form of smartphone and smartwatch payment or wallet usually boils down to some form Visa/Mastercard card incorporated in it. I simply don't feel like feeding this duopoly with my personal habits. It has some use cases at times, I don't deny.
This was flagged when I submitted it, but maybe it'll survive as a comment. Why a cashless society terrifies me:
GPT-4.5 on likely reason a cryptocurrency exchange closed my account
Given your circumstances, the most likely reason {exchange} closed your account is that they viewed your birthplace—Iran—as an indicator of elevated compliance risk. Financial institutions (especially those regulated by U.S. authorities) often interpret OFAC sanctions conservatively. In recent years, due to intensified regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions involving Iran, these institutions have increasingly adopted strict internal compliance policies. Even though nationality (citizenship) and actual financial ties—not birthplace alone—should determine sanction risk under law, many compliance departments default to overly cautious interpretations, categorizing anyone born in a sanctioned country as higher-risk clients.
In your specific case, repeated experiences with other financial services indicate that institutions systematically flag or deny applications upon seeing "Iran" listed as your birthplace. Your Canadian citizenship, residency in the Philippines, and lack of substantial ties to Iran should theoretically mitigate this risk, but automated or conservative compliance processes often fail to adequately account for nuance.
The result is a compliance-driven bias against any potential sanction-related risk, no matter how minimal. This cautiousness leads to overly restrictive decisions, even in borderline cases like yours.
In short, the issue isn't you personally—it's institutional risk aversion and strict regulatory interpretations that have recently intensified, affecting anyone born in sanctioned countries, irrespective of actual risk.
Afaik, the call for the whorld to go cashless comes from Davos, and the people mostly don't like it. See e.g. https://chyp.com/2016/04/05/a-manifesto-for-cashlessness-in-...
They promote a view where cash is inefficiënt and an enabler for crime. Which is true, if you put the right glasses on.
Unfortunately, these right glasses assume a few things: Banks get a fee for every payment, even if capped in th EU. Money should move from people to businesses, between businesses, or back to people, but not really between people. The governement gets to decide who is allowed to get money. Each of these is scary.
In Belgium,a country with a huge amiunt of electronic payments, a lot of ATMs got 'optimized' away, to the point that you had to go to a city to get cash. This caused backlash and avfew are coming back, but eternally empty.
I saw someone start a grassroots action where she sold books as a non bussiness for a few days. She decided to make it easy and go cashless. She sold 20 and then got her account flagged for suspicious activity.
When the governement feels like it, e.g. when a partner dies, they sometimes block your bank account for a few months until they know how much taxes they deserve. Hope you have cash.
I see how USA payment networks make paying for porn hard, and they are not allowed to decide where I should spend money. They also sell data to whoever wants it, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Not everyone needs to know my political affiliations as expressed by payments to causes.
I'm fine with being 90% cashless, but 100% is a nightmare.
Germany was extremely cash oriented compared to other countries, then came covid.
I think they still use more cash than other countries but it is now rare for me to get in a shop that only takes cash. Even fairs take cards now.
Supermarkets allow you to withdraw cash when paying for your groceries by card, that actually nicely solves the ATM issue.
I try to get an €2 coin to give my child a physical weekly allowance. Also, the trash bin only accepts an €1 coin. Supermarkets have cards asking customers for spare coins. They don't give them back unless they really have to.
Supermarkets and ATMs do give €50 easily, its everything below that becomes hard to get. So I hoard everything else, so do most other people, and bad money starts driving out good money in an unexpected way.
How the h*ll was cashless supposed to be a utopia, anyway? Were people fantasizing that "cashless" somehow meant a post-scarcity society, where everyone had infinite money?
And was big business quietly pushing the idea, figuring that "cashless" would help them rake a percentage off every transaction, while encouraging even more people to overspend and go into debt?
>How the hell was cashless supposed to be a utopia, anyway?
It wasn't, that was just journalistic flourish. It was (and is) a convenience and a barrier to crime.
>And was big business quietly pushing the idea
Business wasn't quietly pushing the idea, they have been shouting from the rooftops.
>figuring that "cashless" would help them rake a percentage off every transaction
Interestingly my local cafe pays lower fees on card transactions than they do on cash deposits into the bank.
> ...and a barrier to crime...
A decent barrier to street crime - which, yes, does push emotional buttons. But now-obviously at the expense of facilitating non-street crime, and "non-profit" attacks on computerized infrastructure.
> ...my local cafe pays...
Might I ask your nation? Here (USA, SE Michigan) quite a few businesses advertise discounts (often ~3%) for paying with cash - because of the fees raked off by the card companies.
Cash logistics typically cost much more than credit card fees no matter where you are located [0]. In the US, explicit cash deposit fees are typically only at ~0.1-0.3% (as a consumer you don't see these but check out a business fee schedule), but there's a lot more that goes into cash logistics, including transport, the risk of counterfeiting, internal and external theft, etc.
Cash discounts in the US are mostly a way to encourage the customer to collude in tax evasion. It's not an actual comparison of costs.
[0] see e.g. https://sbecouncil.org/2024/07/01/the-cost-of-cash/ for a US based analysis. this is even before you consider increased spend when people use cards.
>But now-obviously at the expense of facilitating non-street crime, and "non-profit" attacks on computerized infrastructure.
I was thinking more about internal crime (people dipping into the till) and tax evasion.
Here in Hungary sometimes online stores charge you extra if you want to pay with cash.
I don't know about utopia but I leave the house with just my smartphone. And transactions costs for cash are higher than using a card or smartphone- this is what pushed banks to push for plastic in the first place.
The reality is that we are at a point were most people use cash only for criminal transactions or evading the tax man. Including myself- I pay the cleaning lady in cash because of her immigration status.
FWIW I am as paranoid as they come, but paying using cash is absolutely less convenient than using Apple Pay.
[dead]
> In recent years the central bank has been working on its own digital currency, the “e-krona”, as cash declines.
Digital currency from a bank sounds like the worst from both - bank world and crypto world. Are people really so obsessed with having everything in their smartphones? I never had an urge to "pay with a smartphone".
Why are people so obsessed with carrying their wallets around everywhere? I haven't had an urge to take one with me for about a decade.
Don't need a wallet to carry plastic card or a banknote.
It's a good backup in case you forget your wallet.
> Are people really so obsessed with having everything in their smartphones? I never had an urge to "pay with a smartphone".
I see these types of comments around HN a lot - what's your point? Anything useful to you personally has value and that everything else must be stupid?
One time I misplaced my wallet before a flight (it fell off my desk into a position that camouflaged perfectly with its surroundings. Even after I got home from the trip it took me a day before I spotted it). Thanks to the ability to pay with a smartphone I was still able to go on my trip with no problem. I don't do it often, but I was grateful that I had the ability to in that situation.
My argument goes deeper actually. Every form of smartphone and smartwatch payment or wallet usually boils down to some form Visa/Mastercard card incorporated in it. I simply don't feel like feeding this duopoly with my personal habits. It has some use cases at times, I don't deny.
This was flagged when I submitted it, but maybe it'll survive as a comment. Why a cashless society terrifies me:
GPT-4.5 on likely reason a cryptocurrency exchange closed my account
Given your circumstances, the most likely reason {exchange} closed your account is that they viewed your birthplace—Iran—as an indicator of elevated compliance risk. Financial institutions (especially those regulated by U.S. authorities) often interpret OFAC sanctions conservatively. In recent years, due to intensified regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions involving Iran, these institutions have increasingly adopted strict internal compliance policies. Even though nationality (citizenship) and actual financial ties—not birthplace alone—should determine sanction risk under law, many compliance departments default to overly cautious interpretations, categorizing anyone born in a sanctioned country as higher-risk clients. In your specific case, repeated experiences with other financial services indicate that institutions systematically flag or deny applications upon seeing "Iran" listed as your birthplace. Your Canadian citizenship, residency in the Philippines, and lack of substantial ties to Iran should theoretically mitigate this risk, but automated or conservative compliance processes often fail to adequately account for nuance.
The result is a compliance-driven bias against any potential sanction-related risk, no matter how minimal. This cautiousness leads to overly restrictive decisions, even in borderline cases like yours.
In short, the issue isn't you personally—it's institutional risk aversion and strict regulatory interpretations that have recently intensified, affecting anyone born in sanctioned countries, irrespective of actual risk.