Also the local eBay equivalent TradeMe gained its popularity on this network. Given somebody’s bank account number I can transfer money to their account within an hour (used to be overnight until a few years ago). There’s no reversal for this so it’s safe for the seller, and since it’s a real bank there’s no way to freeze it without a court order.

The banks being banks of course are trying to ruin this, since using the big card networks gives them free revenue.

The only thing for which I use credit cards are online purchases from foreign websites that don't support iDeal.

Everything else is through regular bank transactions, either through pin card, direct transactions, or iDeal. All Dutch banks support iDeal, and I wish the rest of the world would too because it's vastly superior to credit cards.

Using my card, I get good post-purchase protection (via threat of chargeback or card issuer-provided warranty increase) and excellent fraud protection.

Everything is handled by my own bank, and if I don't trust my own bank, I can choose a better bank and use that. With credit cards, I have to use whatever payment provider the merchant uses, and either they or the merchant can hang on to my credit card number, which weirdly is sufficient to access my money. Also, there are only two credit card providers that really count; not a lot of choice there.

Chargebacks may seem attractive as a buyer, but they also mean that a seller can lose their money after they legitimately sent the goods. Merchants would have to track down individual customers to sue them to get their money back.

Still you don’t really see the vendors at small farmer’s markets with the payclip things like you do in NZ.

The finality of cash avoids having to keep, organize, and verify a lot of paper records if you don't really need the receipts.

Both in games with premium currencies like diamonds, and in real life with plastic cards and services, it's been shown time and again that the further you are from actual cash the more you spend.

This can't be emphasised enough and is, to my mind, a near complete explanation of the drive for cashless. We, as good consumers, will spend more in a cashless world.

When we were struggling to make ends meet after the dot com bust we slowly realised this, and came to draw out cash first for everything possible. If the cash wasn't there first, it did not get bought. I will still, nearing 20 years on, draw cash prior to shopping, or buying fuel etc. Debit cards get used online. The credit card lives in a drawer. Unused and balance free for years.

I don't care if it would be 10x easier and I'd get 1.5% cashback on the purchase with the credit card; I want them to have the experience and understand that they are trading away a limited resource that took time and effort to acquire, not just mindless swipe/stick/tap.

That last bit, that's a profound observation. There is some real demand, but not much. More so there is theoretical demand. In theory I want the option to pay with cash because dammit I want that last vestige of freedom from being tracked and taxed.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe

Cash is an important palliative for the feeling that perhaps we aren't as free as we would like to believe.

MobilePay, a person-to-person payment app in Denmark, is a huge deal here. It had 3 million users in 2016 (out of 7 million people!), and its second-priority shop payment feature (that arrived much later) is challenging credit cards. It's used for everything from selling used goods to splitting bills.

Swish, the Swedish equivalent, has 4 million users.

Vipp, the Norwegian equivalent, has 2.7 million users.

Peter-pays-Paul has huge demand here. Bitcoin is just a terrible solution to that problem.

(uggedal provided the Swedish and Norwegian numbers).

Note, though, that it's not really just Peter paying Paul, as the transaction is still between their respective banks with everything that entails. And a MobilePay account is actually tied to a specific payment card. I have had a MobilePay transaction refused (and from a public institution, no less) because my account did not involve a Dankort, the only payment card the institution deemed acceptable.

Anyway, it is really Peter paying Paul. It is just centralized and in a stable currency, with all the benefits that entail, such as instant execution, ease of use and predictable outcome. It of course also has the downside: There are gate keepers, in the form of Danske Bank and other banks involved.

Bitcoin is also Peter paying Paul, but decentralized/p2p. And, frankly, this is its Achilles heel as much as it is its greatest feature.

You might be misunderstanding how MobilePay engaged with payment cards. Things have changed a bit since the start, but MobilePay originally asked for your dankort info to extract bank account information. It performed direct bank transfers, screwing Nets over for transaction fees (anything screwing over Nets is good for mankind).

However, because people demanded the support, "real" credit cards was later added (not sure if only for shopping), but they're likely letting stores eat the fees. Thus, they probably let the store pick whether they support cards that cost them fees. In general, the MobilePay used for stores is very different in function from the one used between users.

(I was in fintech with companies like Nets as client when MobilePay launched, but that is not the case anymore, so my info may be out of date.)

Freedom always was an aristocratic privilege.

What they sold to the proles - with heavy advertising, at a price up to your life - was a cheap knock-off.

4. In Sweden, and some other European countries (and China?) a lemonade stand works by person-to-person bank transfers, initiated using a mobile phone app. The Swedish one is called Swish, but I link to the Danish one [2] as they have an English explanation.

People really do use these apps for things like lemonade stands. I've seen an unattended garage sale, where everything was priced and a sign gave a phone number for payment.

It's also commonly used person-to-person, e.g. if a friend owes me for a spare concert ticket, part of a restaurant bill or whatever.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png

[2] https://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/The-story-in-English.aspx

Yes, but not automatically. You have to manually log all your spending by category yourself.

Big data has advantages but you have to trade off your privacy in exchange for the convenience.

Built in privacy for some people is a feature. For others it’s a bug.

No, neither can it break down my spending habits for the banks, the government, and anyone else with access (authorized or not) to that data. One of the most important reasons I use cash.

The United States has this via Venmo. But Venmo doesn't replace business transactions, only personal ones.

Venmo falls well short of the transfer apps in most countries.

Is this month's data an outlier or do you really spend $1000/month on fast food?!

Also, I can recategorize any transaction, or all transactions from any merchant. I think I set the canteen at work to "fast food", as it's a food category I almost never spend in otherwise.

(The interface is the default view of my online banking, but otherwise, I don't use it. It's very swish, but fortunately I don't need to budget this way.)

My Danish isn't good enough to reliably say what it is when speaking Danish. Probably something like "Jeg mobilepayer dig halvtres¹ kroner"

The system in Britain (Paym) hasn't really caught on. They might be less keen to verb a noun.

¹ This is why I avoid discussing numbers in Danish.

But then again, I'm ancient.

Not in the European Union where this fee is capped to 0,3%.

It's supposed to handle the problem, but we all know that the companies just increase prices to compensate.

I don't know the real number for the economy as a whole, but the experience I do have (mostly in the higher risk/cost "card-not-present" scenarios) actual transaction costs are always higher than they seem at first glance.

For example, retailers bear the majority of fraud risk. Add that in, and the cost of anti-fraud.. it adds up. Then there's the consumer side, where users "pay" fees, pay interest rates..

My point is that all these digital payment (including the paper-originally CCs) tend to become bottlenecks and oligopolies. Banks, CCs, gateways.. all tend to centralisation, regulation and low competition. All the ingredients for price inflation.

The idea of having to pay a fee to a series of private companies in order to be permitted to use money is absurd.

Dealing with cash isn't free to merchants either. And that cost is passed on to the customer.

Sure, governments that are pushing for a cashless society have ulterior motives. But you can't blame them for capping fees that used to be just spread onto everybody, regardless of the payment method. Now at least they're supposed to be comparable.

Banks have gotten more and more greedy, and come up with new and creative ways to charge extravagant fees, and thus charge merchants for cash orders and deposits (even though it is free for private customers).

These fees are however a very different concept, as the bank here is only a storage service. The fees are entirely avoidable by buying a safe, and the fees are not related to money changing hands.

With a credit card, fees are unavoidable and part of the transaction itself, and they're not even going to your bank, meaning that they want a slice of the cake from elsewhere (despite them technically earning money on your stored money through investments).

[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...

What recourse do you have if banks refuse to take your money? If credit card companies refuse to give you a line of credit? I don't know much about that level of infrastructure but it definitely seems ripe for abuse in this way. I don't know what laws govern this and it concerns me how the current system is set up that through activist pressure that people might not be able to sustain themselves for opinions that are declared outside the Overton window.

It's not ideal, and it's very easy to get ripped off, but it's possible to live that way. Millions of people do.

In nine years, bitcoin keeps on ticking and evolving. Segwit was/is a big deal, as lack of segwit held up further development. Lightning, x-chain atomic swaps, Schnorr signatures, MAST, side-chains to name a few additional features and improvements.

It's early days yet. Give it time.

In my neighborhood, with Square. Or at least that's how the kids a couple of streets over did it last year. With great big cartoony Visa and MasterCard logos on posterboard.

In Denmark, the MobilePay system is massive, and challenging credit card payments.

It is designed entirely for person-to-person payments, and only later added support for shop purchases as a lower-priority feature. It is used for all sorts of things, including splitting bills and selling used goods, all legal.

Sweden has Swish, but I never figured out if it was popular. MobilePay, on the other hand, is huge.

Edit: "Swipp" -> "Swish". Swipp is dead.

Norway also has a hugely popular p2p payment app called Vipps with 2.7 million users.

Disclaimer: I work for Vipps AS

MobilePay passed 3 million users in 2016 (out of ~7 million people). I don't have any updated statistics.

Anyway, with your added numbers, it is quite clear that at least in Scandinavia, person to person transfers are very common.

"Going cashless" is a flavor of class warfare. There are some people that absolutely depend on, live on, cash. Believe it or not, there are people that do not have access to cards.

Do people really have that much opportunity to spend cash? And for those opportunities, isn't the 2% tax a fairly reasonable price to pay for the safety of never needing to carry cash around and the convenience of never needing to go to an ATM or run out of cash?

I imagine petty theft crime has dropped significantly in large part because people stopped carrying cash.

Point 2 is.. I think your reasoning about cash costs relates to point 4. These kinds of costs are something that big, high turnover businesses are concerned with. I don't think a tiny, rural cafe cares too much that €190 of its €780 daily take is cash.

We pay with cards with paypass wirelessly without PIN for small amounts. This is faster than cash.

I recently stopped carrying coins and avoid paying cash.

And bank transfers are free in most banks. It takes half a day at most to reach destination bank.

In my country even beggars accept cashless payments.