In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concerns about trust, privacy

Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by CogitoCogito on Friday May 25, 2018 @06:32AM (#17152167)

Personally I find the push in Sweden to only use card much more annoying. Cash tends to fail much more rarely for me than cards. Of course there's no reason why they can't coexist but since much of the official point of cashless is tracking, cash will always be bad for those pushing for increased surveillance.

Incidentally when I lived in Berlin I used to only use cash and I never found it a bother. My bank had ATMs in many places and it really wasn't very hard to keep cash around. I've always found it a little odd when people talk about ATMs as being inconvenient when historically they're probably as convenient as they've ever been. Of course it is always easier not to have to go to an ATM, but today it really isn't that hard unless you have some tiny ATM network.

Regardless, having both cash and cashless is definitely the best of both worlds. Convenience, redundancy, autonomy. I wish people would stop unnecessarily view the two methods as incompatible when they complement each other so well.

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by chatmasta on Friday May 25, 2018 @10:36AM (#17154097)

I don’t think the view is that they are incompatible with each other, but rather that cash is incompatible with the motives of payment processors and banks.

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by petre on Friday May 25, 2018 @11:12AM (#17154432)

Add to that the motives of state institutions who can freely put their fingers in the honey jar (your bank account).

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by kungtotte on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:36PM (#17157129)

There's also the security angle. You can't rob a cashless place of business. This is the official reason given by many businesses here in Sweden as to why they're going cashless, and many who don't go cashless use lockbox systems where the cashier can't access the cash at all. The machine dispenses correct change as part of a transaction, but otherwise it's locked tight.

I'd be interested to see any data collected regarding this; whether or not armed robbery against things like restaurants and grocery stores has decreased after the move to cashless.

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by michaelt on Friday May 25, 2018 @10:57AM (#17154308)

If the benefit of cashless is that you don't have to carry around a pocket full of cash, they're incompatible in the sense that if you use both, you lose that benefit.

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by CogitoCogito on Friday May 25, 2018 @11:40AM (#17154743)

If a store takes cash and card why do you need to carry cash? There is no incompatibility whatsoever. Having both only gives you more options.

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Re:In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concer... by mrweasel on Friday May 25, 2018 @12:47PM (#17155487)

>Cash tends to fail much more rarely for me than cards.

It's the same in Denmark. The payment processing networks are really stable, just not stable enough to eliminate or not always carry enough cash to pay for groceries.

When payment processing have 100% uptime for five years, then maybe we can debate eliminating cash in some places.

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