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A new study out of Sweden says the tiny country is on course to become the world's first "cashless society," thanks in part to a mobile payment app called Swish.
The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm released a statement in October quoting researcher Niklas Arvidsson, who said cash is an important means of payment in many countries, "... but that no longer applies here in Sweden."
Arvidsson and his team of researchers said there are about 80 billion Swedish crowns in regular circulation, down from 106 billion six years ago. "And out of that amount, only somewhere between 40 and 60 percent is actually in regular circulation. ... Our use of cash is small, and it is decreasing rapidly."
Swish has more than 3.5 million users (of Sweden's total population of 9.5 million) and nearly 4.5 billion Swedish crowns were "Swished" in October.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday November 11 2015, @03:43AM
If I could ban cash altogether, and force everyone to:
d) Be forced to submit to more tracking in a world where privacy violations are already ubiquitous.
Congratulations on helping to outlaw privacy. Even if having no cash would have some 'benefits', the ends don't justify the means. Freedom is more important than safety. As such, getting rid of cash is a terrible idea, and banning it is outright vomit-inducing.
That's if you're saying banning cash would be a good idea under those conditions.
When Italy forced cash transactions over 1000eur to be illegal no evasors and mafia bosses lined up to get under trial, the result was simply more power to the banks who do all transactions. Big evasors have more resources to cheat. Now it seems they revert to 3000 eur legal transactions and people are angry, without even bothering to check whether the previous limit actually helped.
Whether the previous limit "helped" is completely irrelevant because the idea of banning something merely because it could be abused is disgusting and anathema to the very concept of freedom. That's the real problem with it, not merely that it turns out that the previous limit didn't actually 'help'.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 16 2015, @06:15PM
I respect your opinion, especially because IN PRACTICE I hold the same one. But "in practice" means choosing between two evils, that's what you do when you advocate for your distorted idea of privacy.
In theory, the amount of money and wealth and power you have has nothing to do with PRIVACY. It is kept private because of criminality. If all transactions were public it would be impossible to steal and bribe (remember, it's theory). It would still be possible to use private data to frame people ("give me six lines written from the most honest of men"), this is a valid objection. The main objection is that a system that needs to be 100% perfect to achieve its objective is the definition of a scam.
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