> In europe most of the population seems to prefer to pay in cash (for clothes, groceries, electronics etc. pp.).

That is a very coarse and completely unfounded statement. The situation differs greatly per country; you can spend months without touching cash in the Netherlands or Sweden. In the Netherlands we've passed the 50% mark for electronic debit card payments at a point of sale a decade ago!

Online purchases are soaring too across the continent, which means that for clothes and electronics there is a shift towards less and less cash transactions each day.

I should have worded it better, but it's not wrong. It's predicted that cards wil overtake cash by 2022, at the moment cash is ahead: https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/9746746/Cashing+In...

probably because netherlands and sweden make up only 4% of europes population and the other countries are slower at adopting it.

Denmark has largely converted to cards and, over the past year or so, a mobile payment app made by the largest bank.

I know maybe a handful of people except myself under 50 who still use cash for anything, ever. They tend to also have Thinkpads and GPG keys.

Except Sweden apparently.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/04/sweden-cash...

The article you linked was on HN's or reddit's frontpage recently, that's why I wrote "most". ;o) (plus I don't know enough about every european country obviously).

EDIT - looking at the date of the article it might have been not the same, but a similar one.

Anecdotally, I think you're generally right that Europe isn't as heavily into plastic (whether credit cards or something else) as the US. (Though they're pretty widely-accepted in the UK where I spend most of my European time.) I'll be in Germany at the end of the month and it sounds as if I should definitely expect to pay cash a lot of the time.

Sweden does seem to be this cashless outlier for some reason. [EDIT: I gather it's a Nordics thing more generally.] I think it was also featured in a Freakonomics episode fairly recently.

> Anecdotally, I think you're generally right that Europe isn't as heavily into plastic […]

Depends on your definition of plastic. Debit cards are common here. Europeans tend not to use credit cards as much as Americans though; they are mostly used just for travelling or (international) internet purchases.