Cash is a way into those grey areas.

So that you can not have a phone, or be a hobo, be off the grid, go to a gay bar without leaving a trace, hold a controversial artistic/polical/religious event, let a beaten spouse organize an escape, mess around as a kid without your parents always knowing everything, try a product the state doesn't approve of and so on.

Exactly. We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone. I am all for contactless payment, but I want the option to use cash. The only thing that guarantees privacy.

And this is especially true in places without democracy, as shown in the Hong Kong Protest.

See, in the US, coins are kind of useless on their own. You can't pay for anything with only coins, so giving exact change is always an extra step on top of paying with cash. Ugh.

But in the EU, they have €1 and €2 coins, and it's difficult to overstate how much this changes the dynamic. It means that for purchases under ~€10, it's suddenly possible to pay with coins only. It also means that for cash purchases, you can often receive your change as, well, change. So for large purchases, I'll pay with cash only and receive change, which goes in my coin pouch, and for small purchases I'll give exact change in coins only, using them up.

This actually becomes less onerous than paying exclusively with bills, like I do in the US, because you use up your coins naturally instead of collecting them in a jar or something to be counted later.

It also helps that taxes are included in the price label, so a €5.99 purchase will yield €0.01 instead of something in the vicinity of $0.75.

Every now and then I go to the local marketplace at the city square and exchange my coin jar for a stack of bills. They usually have to pay for the coins so it's a beneficial exchange for us both.

I have about $600+ in a big coin jar with a bunch of paper dollars thrown in. I’ll buy an iPad or a vacation once it reaches the top.

I have no idea how you do your shopping and end up not getting a pool of useless 1/5 cent coins. People literally laugh you in the face if you try to purchase things with them. Your only option is to give them away or collect them in a jar.

And needing to constantly go to ATMs just to keep notes on you is kind of ridiculous.

However I've also been to card only restaurants in Sweden when the card network was down. There was no plan B, the payment interaction just fell apart.

Bakeries in France now have this as well

If I pick up an item that claims to be $1.99, and plunk it down on the counter with $2, I don't want the cashier to say "That'll be $2.16, please." The label says $1.99 . They could have added the tax when they printed it. If they wanted the label price to be $1.99, they could have made the base price $1.83, and added the tax back in to make it $1.99 on the shelf.

If I go to a concession stand at a ball game, their list prices are all-taxes-included. $2 for a hot dog means if I ask for a hot dog, and pay $2 exactly, no one needs to mess around with change. Why can't other merchants do that?

It's not like consumers can just choose to stop buying things if the sales tax goes up. "What's that? Sales taxes went from 8.75% to 9.15% ? Oh, never mind, then, I'll just stop buying anything from here on out."

Also, i don't need ATMs that often. 100€ last me for a while and you can of course also use a card if you don't have enough cash on you.

Not sure how it is in Germany, but we have ATMs on every street corner, so it's not a big deal.

I do prefer paying via Apple Pay though.

First of all, some cities like Berlin (which might be the worst offender here) are ridiculous in terms of how cash-dependent they are. There are whole areas (e.g. Kreuzberg) where you can't find a restaurant that accepts (debit or credit) card payment, even if you eat for 20+€. So, going out for lunch can deplete your cash quite rapidly.

Secondly, private banking is a huge cost centre for banks right now. This means that banks institute a lot of restrictions on when and where you can get cash. Many common banks (e.g. Sparkassen, Volksbanken) only allow you to withdraw money without charge from very specific ATMs, so you have to know where those are; if you withdraw from another ATM, you might have to pay a ridiculous amount of money (e.g. 5€), which is why you'd only use it for an emergency. Some other banks allow you to withdraw from any ATM without charge, but they have been starting to add more and more restrictions, e.g. you can only withdraw money 5x a month or something like that.

Keeping cash is a weekly issue with me? Not quite 'all the time'.

Still have to experience someone laughing in my face for doing so.

I use € coins for tips or cereal bar purchases. In my country you'd get odd looks if you did that, because we have a bill that's roughly equivalent to 1€. But in Germany or Austria you'll get smiles and herzlichen grüßen because sparing-inclined citizens of the aforementioned countries only tip small change like 10 or 20 cents. Doing it often enough at a Greek tavern gets you freebies.

Hardly. Just have your coins ready at the cashier. Often you can do the math yourself and present the money immediately and in the correct amount. On some glorious and surprisingly frequent days, you can empty your coin pouch in one swoop. It’s a nice little game.

Anyway, nobody is obliged to sacrifice their privacy because someone in the queue can’t manage their time properly.

If there's practically nothing you can buy with two of a coin, it's probably time for it to go.

> We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone.

Once you take out the fact that e.g. messages you write are being recorded, your speech is being monitored 24/7 by a microphone in your home, or all your text input is being stored in somebody's server halfway across the world, those technologies could have the potential to be really neat indeed.

One can dream.

I guess, if you are ok with leaving an electronic trail whereever you go...

One of the most ridiculous thing about this country is that anonymity is not a right according to the constitution.

Don't the plastic cards cost extra?

Pretty easy to ping these cards and any wireless ID (IMSI, WiFi MAC). Enough hits and the correlations will easily fall in to place.

Don't know about Sweden, but in the Netherlands that's widely supported and free for consumers. What's the harm in people using a proprietary app on top of that that has slightly more convenience?

I've yet to have anyone refuse to pay me via direct bank transfer or me paying them in this way when I ask and explain why I don't use Vipps.

please explain. direct bank transfers are still slow (same bank) to unacceptable (different banks) for most payments

> still slow (same bank)

SEPA instant credit transfer is standardized since 2017 and supported by > 50% of banks & payment providers (https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...). If both parties support that then bank transfers take under 10 seconds.

If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. 1 day isn't something you can use in a shop of course, but if you need to pay back a friend it's pretty acceptable imo.

> unacceptable (different banks)

Not accepting IBANs or SEPA payments from other banks or from banks in other EU countries is illegal, and comes with substantial fines.

It still happens in places of course, especially in slow moving large orgs, but if you still find organizations doing this nowadays then you can report them as breaching EU payment regulations (https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain) and that should set a fire under things pretty quickly.

Right, but one business day will often be two days during the week and four days over the weekend, because many banks set an arbitrary cut-off time after which they will no longer process any payments.

One bank I use will process payments received after 12:00 pm (lunchtime) on the next day. So the money will arrive two days later, unless it's a Friday, in which case the money arrives on Tuesday.

A bank will tell me if I enter the account number wrong at least and show me the name of the account holder before I press send, with Vipps you just go without validation.

Direct bank transfers in Norway can be made instantly for a tiny fee, but personally I have yet to be in a situation where that is required.

But also, in any case it's still a bad idea because the payment provider has the ability to just disobey your payment orders, and regulation doesn't help with that but rather potentially makes it even more likely "for security reasons". Payment providers use secret methods to decide whether your payment order is considered a security risk and then will prevent you from spending your own money based on their secret decision making process, or at least make you jump through unpredictable hoops before they allow you to spend your own money. That's a major security risk for you, in addition to all the security risks due to the well-known terrible IT security practices of banks as well as/in combination with the privacy risks of leaving a digital trail of your locations and purchases.

E.g. When you use the card to pay for A, the receiver many query in a federate system and found that you also paid for B recently.

There has been incredible lobbying for this. This is the ultimate capitalist's wet dream: making a profit on every transaction. The privacy angle is tangential, just collateral in the land-grab, just one more way to squeeze the last drop of profit out of everything you do.

Besides, the sharing of the data with 'authorities' was the lube that pushed these systems in. Gotta catch them terrorists, right. No no no, it might seem like a grandparent giving $50 dollar to her grandson on his birthday, but I'm telling ya'll, terrorism.

I fully understand that my opinion is both unintuitive and deeply disliked by many if not most people, so I can only ask you to spend some time thinking if you really have thought this through.

Anyway, I believe there are realistic scenarios where it is good for the economy and society to have negative interest rates imposed by central banks. Cash is one of the things that prohibits this, thus we need to get rid of cash. At the same time we definitely need privacy respecting payment methods. Thus we would likely need to develop some kind of physical tokens/coins/notes/whatever whose value is time dependent.

Biggest problem here is that the amount of people who simultaneously understand the need of negative rates and privacy respecting payment systems seems to be for all practical purposes pretty close to zero, so I am not holding my breath here.

I am no economist and those might be more used to negative interest rate if they include inflation, but on the other hand it is just another tool for central banks to perhaps stimulate the economy. In my personal opinion, these monetary policies have not been all too impressive.

But no, I certainly wouldn't give up cash for a central bank to have some tool with questionable efficiency. If we are talking about wealth distribution, we should talk about limiting inheritances or something like that. Otherwise I would assume that bankers are more interested in pumping money in the economy.

I would stuff my cash into my mattress if interest rates become too low. That would probably have the effect of increasing them again if enough people do so.

We have a problem with private losses being put on the tab of tax payers. You would need to solve that problem too aside from the lacking privacy of digital cash to make me think about it.

Some economists are also critical about these policies, so it isn't really clear, if negative rate will help in the first place. That some are afraid of deflation might have something to do with debt, couldn't that just be the case?

[1] Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can voluntarily choose to lend your money to the bank if you agree with the interest rate. If you do not, you are free to do as you please with your money. Find someone who is willing to pay better interest rates (typically more risky)[2], buy crap, or even buy bitcoin or gold.

[2] Interesting question is, why society should guarantee you a return[3] on your investments if you do not yourself find a counterparty that is willing to pay you high enough return that you are happy with? Smells awfully lot like socialism to me.

[3] And why this guaranteed return needs to be exactly 0%? Why not 5%?

(A note, The questions I made above are not meant to be snarky. Those are the kind of questions I struggled literally for months when I tried to get my head around negative rates and whether they make sense or not.)

I also don't see that there's much difference between nominal negative rates on the one hand and ZIRP plus inflation on the other, which is what pretty much all the big central banks are doing already and which cash doesn't protect against at all. They both punish saving at a time when the ratio of retired to working people is increasing and the latter's ability to support the former is looking shaky.

There's a separate argument to be had about financial repression [1], but it's a bit more contentious and I don't think you need to accept the badness of that to be against negative interest rates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression

the real threat is the trail created which no government is going to allow you to vacate. just the possibility of a prior acquaintance or business transaction running afoul of the can give some the means to penalize you for past legal deeds in some countries. let alone put you under the scope for having performed now illegal activities, after all why would the want to suspect you aren't predisposed to do it again?

finally it really can be used to put a damper on people just leaving high tax areas because they can just electronically debit you for the act.

Could you articulate one of those scenarios and why negative interest rates would be the best solution?

TL;DR: When even at zero rates, aggregate demand is less than aggregate supply.

Then a small disclaimer. I am not an economist by trade, so whatever I write below is my thinking, not learned from a book. Thus no sources available, and take everything with a grain of salt anyway...

If you look at the (macro)economy in the short term from the central bank point of view, there are basically a handful of interesting concepts here. first one is (real) aggregate supply, i.e. how much crap and services economy can produce. In the short term, central bank can not do much about this. (so if you want to draw this, we have a horizontal line above x-axis on a chart where interest rate is x axis and production/demand on the y axis). Second one is aggregate (real) demand, i.e. how much people are willing to buy crap and services given the current interest rates. This is something central bank can affect. With a small trick. they can move the demand to the future or from the future by adjusting the interest rate. If interest rates get higher, people take less loans to buy crap and save more. The opposite when interest rates go lower. (thus, in our drawing, we have a downward sloping line for demand. Draw it so that it crosses the supply on the left of Y-axis for this exercise).Third one is inflation, which I will come back a tiny bit later.

So, now we have a nice (kind of) supply and demand chart. And we see that if we limit the interest rate to zero, we will have oversupply in the economy. That translates to things like unemployment, lower profits for the corporates etc. So we really would like to get the interest rate to the point where supply and demand are equal.

But what about the inflation? One solution would be to have 5% inflation so that zero interest rates would mean -5% interest rates and all would be good again, right? Yep, kind of. If you look again a the chart, where we could find more inflation is where the demand is higher than supply. But that area is even further to the left. To induce inflation, central bank should push the rates even lower than the equilibrium state. and that's why our economies have been between rock and a hard place so long. If we had had an inflation target of 5% in the first place, our life would be much easier. But now we are stuck. And central banks do not have that many options. They can do their best to push the yield curve down to ease as much as possible, but also that has limits. So we are banging against the zero floor and only thing central bank can do is wait for cashless economy or long term economic growth that will increase the aggregate demand. But that is, of course, hampered by lack of demand. Shitty place to be in, today's central bank.

The argument against this is "oversupply in all sectors, so nowhere to reallocate the supply to", but this is clearly nonsense when people are demanding better housing, healthcare, and education.

1. Prices (especially wages) are sticky. Interest rates you can adjust overnight, but to get the adjustment of wages can easily take years.

2. Economy is not actually nicely behaving equilibrium seeking thingy, but a complex, chaotic system with various time constants. So we actually need a body that works to stabilize the mismatches of aggregate supply and demand. So it is not "artificially propping" demand, but trying to actively keep demand and supply aligned. And people may be "demanding" better housing, but it does not mean they can afford to.

Granted, that would cause unemployment in the industries that people would rather give up consuming from, but maybe that would free up some talent to go into building houses - isn't that how the capitalist system is supposed to work, that things people don't want don't get produced?