I live in London too and use cash all the time! You should visit a food market — London has some of the best food markets I’ve been to! They are almost all “cash”. And generally, if you buy less than £10 at a local store, they inform you it’s cash only.

Interesting... I live quite centrally, and the markets round me accept contactless card payments. Also, even if I'm buying chewing gum at my local corner shop, the owner accepts payment by debit card (however that may be because I'm a regular).

Hmm, interesting — I’m Zone 1 as well. Check out the Sunday Upmarket in Shoreditch and you’ll see what I mean =)

I believe their definition of electric cash, although fuzzy, included the attribute of being not tied to a bank. Are there cashless payments in London which do not in some way tie to a bank? Asking as someone not from London.

Everything is tied to a bank at the moment, but in mid January a new directive called PSD2 lands - this will make banks and bank account information much more open (and hopefully start to shake the monopoly banks have on our money and information).

Thank you .. now knows just my bank what's on my accounts. From next year on, if you give access to somebody over PSD2, you just can give full access to your account. So they see everything. A lot of companys will have access to a lot of data with PSD2. 1,2,3 next leak ..

It's about creating an open API, but you control who has access and who doesn't - why is that a bad thing? Also many people hand over their actual bank login details to services such as yodlee which is even less desirable (I believe it even breaches the bank ac's terms of service)!

It's just possible to give full access with PSD2. Even a third company just has access to pay a bill with your account, they can see each transaction on your account. The idea behind PSD2 is, as far I understand, a lot of services should have access to your account, to make it easy to pay with smarthones ond third party cards.

This is a fact that cryptocurrency maximalists love to conveniently forget. Despite all the ramblings about how corrupt and centralized, they are cashing out through a centralized bank.

The noose is tightening on all fronts and I believe we will see offical cryptocurrency backed by a large famous bank....not some phantom coin where majority of supply is owned by a small group of individuals that rely on the banking & legal system that protects them but which they also publicly bash to get more naive people to buy in.

Permissionless, trustless transactions are one of the primary benefits of crypto/blockchain/bitcoin technology.

It's not a benefit that has materialized, nor is there a roadmap to materializing it. Segwit will not make buying coffee with BTC any less reliant on trusting centralized merchant services/exchanges.

Sure it has. The fact that Starbucks hasn't implemented it yet doesn't change that tens of thousands of transactions per day are occurring with BTC. It certainly hasn't hit Visa scale for daily use yet, but either it or another crypto will within the decade.

curious, where are these tends of thousands of transactions occuring directly from consumer to paying for a product at a brick and mortar location?

Let's not count bitcoin mixers and drug transactions.

Same in Sweden. Sweden will probably be the first cashless country in the world. Our central bank has started to look into cryptocurrency (e-krona).