Many people have aversion to actual credit cards because most middle-to-lower-class families have stories of family members going into financial ruin, exacerbated by or ending with credit card debt.

"Just be responsible with your credit cards" is an easy mantra to live by if you are financially privileged.

The only financial privilege needed to use a credit card safely and responsibly is the discipline to not spend more than one can pay when the statement arrives. It's nothing more than self control.

Get a secured card then.

> most middle-to-lower-class families

Citation needed

> To be honest, I always kind of lol at these kinds of rants. Wishing for the "one true payment system" is like thinking that everyone will switch over to speaking Esperanto in the near future.

There always exists cash (except for internet transactions, of course).

Unfortunately, no. Cash is effectively getting phased out in Sweden; these days, there are more physical shops denying cash than accepting it.

Trying to make either a deposit or a withdrawal of "large sums" (> ~1K USD equivalent is my understanding) cash at a bank will get serious scrutiny and may even result in funds being seized or frozen.

Things have changed really fast, too. Just 2 years ago I don't recall ever being in a store which didn't accept cash.

And yet, all solutions other than cash are from private banks, which have no obligations to take you as a customer.

Unfortunately it seems like Sweden is far from alone in being on this trajectory, they're just a little bit ahead in this sense.

I do think that there's a case to be made for permissionlessly operated cryptocurrency on a public ledger here.

I never understood why some shops/restaurants do not take cash. It's only a minor inconvenience having to deposit the cash in-person and you don't lose money on any transaction fee. Maybe to protect against theft? But still, using cash saves the seller 1-3% on that transaction.

Even that isn't a universally acceptable solution; most countries will take dollars as well as local currency in some shops, but by no means all. And if you're from a non-dollar country your chances of international acceptance are much lower.

People want to get paid. Most people will take most forms of payment if it gets them a sale that they wouldn't otherwise get. There's a cost, of course, to supporting different modes of payment, but if the increased business outweighs the cost, most businesses will take payment in that form. They're there to get paid, not to champion one method of payment.

I note, however, that in your first paragraph you dismiss the "one true payment system", and in your second, you pretty much advocate credit cards as that one true system.

I moved from the UK to Germany about 18 months ago.

In the UK, credit cards are widely used but by no means universally owned.

In Berlin, quite a lot of places only take cash, and those which do take cards often only take debit. I don’t think I’ve even seen a single credit card advertised in the window of any high-street bank.

The point is, that there are so many different standards that allow you to pay with one thing everywhere. And I personally need to pay a fee for a credit card, which is the usual case in the EU. And there are not many uses cases or advantages I have for a credit card over a free debit card. The thing is just, that I want to point out in the article, that the systems we have all want to solve this but always fail. Its 2020, not 1990, We have so much tech on our hands and banks still fail to implement it.

Well, not in the US, so maybe the solution then is to just do what we do. I have never had any of your problems, at any merchant, anywhere, in the US.

Agreed, this is simply not an issue in the US.

Our banking system here is backwards in many ways, but the rigamarole described here just doesn't happen. US companies are much better about separating people from their money efficiently, I guess.