As a Swedish person I don't see the point at all: Why would I want to use this? I would rather have a decentralized system of various banks and global companies (Mastercard, Visa, etc) track my transactions and spread out that risk, instead of one single state actor. I could also use, you know, cash.

Digital cash is first and foremost an instrument for new ways to do monetary policy, as more countries (like Sweden and EU) are heading towards a Japanese situation. Playing it as a tool for consumers to fight banks is just marketing/storytelling to gain support and adoption.

For this reason it’s important we start using cash again, and not attend shops and restaurants that don’t take it. Nowadays we have brutal armed robberies like never before, but using non-traceable currency is important for freedom.

Plenty of small businesses in London are still cash only. My local hairdresser for example.

Cherish it!

Source? I would have thought “brutal armed robberies” were way down from historical highs.

Sweden has dramatically changed in the last 20 years and I would guess most here have the old homogenous Sweden in mind.

Like many other countries have had before (such as USA), we are now living with brutal gangs grouped together per ethnicity, except for native Swedes, Finns, and Sami people though. The worst of the new wave of robberies we call “humiliation robberies” (förnedringsrån, you can search with Google Translate) where the victim (mostly natives) is not only forced to withdraw from the ATM, but tortured, forced to undress, pissed upon, forced to say humiliating things, or raped (also men and boys).

The last of many examples to make headlines, where the perpetrators were found, was two young guys in Solna who were forced onto a church yard at night where they were beaten, raped, tortured and robbed. Mainstream media in Sweden does not publish details so I’ll link you one mainstream media article, and one independent blogger - again you might want to use a translation service to read it

https://petterssonsblogg.se/2021/01/07/ali-och-amin-doms-for...

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/solna-man-misshandlade-pa-k...

Young Swedes today know where not to walk after dark in a way their parents never thought about.

If my personal account, the example, or a search into “förnedringsrån” isn’t what you’re looking for, please let me know! You are absolutely right to want to verify claims.

Here is one source about robberies being roughly twice (maybe 1.7-1.9x) as common in 2019 as the period 2006-2015: The graph says "Percentage (of population being) victim of robbery": https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/r...

I have a theory that as the intelligence of solutions preventing crime increases some forms of criminality will become more violent in order to defeat the crime prevention - for example car jacking as a way to get cars because breaking into cars became too difficult for common criminals due to alarms etc.

Spread what risk? They are already making money of you. The risk they take is really small compared to what kind of money they are making...

Keyword: track. As in the privacy concern of the government having direct insight into all your financial transactions.

Sure, they already have the opportunity to demand that information from Swedish commercial banks and other financial institutions, but it's not as convenient as the direct control they have with a centrally managed digital currency.

The really nice thing with fungible physical goods like paper currency or similar is they are not in any shape or form tied to my identity. That's a feature.

I agree with you that cash is the best choice given that privacy is the main concern, even better than bitcoin or any other crypto with a visible blockchain. Banks already tie the money you spend to your identity. I would like to own digital currency, like i own the cash in my wallet. Banks would not like that, since when they would like to own it and lend it to me.

And I believe the Swedish central bank has thought about you you could apply -ve interest rates to bank accounts as Sweden is so massively a non cash society.

I wonder about that. In theory it means you can have interest rates that are well below 0% (think of -2% or worse). The idea behind negative interest rates is that there is work to be done that cannot be financed at a 0% interest rate and that the interest rate has to be even lower.

If you assume 2% bank fees and a -3% interest rate it would be possible for banks to hand out -1% loans and that would allow financially insecure consumers to acquire loans because you cannot default by definition. Your principal will shrink even if you do nothing.

Will this work? I feel like it could work but it could also have unintended consequences.

>because you cannot default by definition. Your principal will shrink even if you do nothing.

That's not what default means. If you stop making monthly payments, you're in default. From wikipedia:

> Default may refer to: Default (finance), failure to satisfy the terms of a loan obligation or failure to pay back a loan

No they where talking about taking the -ve interest from the bank accounts

What does "heading towards a Japanese situation" mean?

I was thinking of the long period of slow economic growth, long period of low interest rates, "chronic deflation", and few tools left by central banks to stimulate the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)#Legacy

A deflationary situation where, to put it in one way, the value of money increases as time passes (as opposed to inflation where the value of money erodes over time). Central banks would then try to set negative interest rates so that any (digital) money one holds can be continuously reduced to incentivize spending rather than saving.

<2 children per woman I would guess, I.e. a lot of old people but few young. Or maybe they mean the high government debt but low real stock market growth?

The core argument here genuinely seems to be that private banks don't want to become obsolete. The article spends a lot of time saying this is bad (or saying that they say it's bad), but it's not clear to me why this is (or even if it truly is).

I must admit over some skepticism given the extreme loucheness of the banking sector.

If banks are obsoleted, then how are mortgages supposed to work?

As much as I hate banks in general, you are hitting the nail on the head. Low interest mortgages and credit in general start to fly out the window. The huge stock piles of cash they have help mitigate their risks effectively. Lower volume of loans also means a whole lot of financial vehicles people invest in for their retirement, are going to wash up as well. Right now, I dont see a viable replacement outside of private lenders like pay cheque loan and car title loans. Huge interest rates and really predatory capital requirements. Sub 20% interest rates, like it or not, come from all the things digi coins want to get rid of.

The Swedish central bank could simply pay you 0.2% of your house price per year by printing more money. Just don’t let the Stockholm/Göteborg housing prices fall... Weimar all over again.

Loans are mostly money printed by central banks and sold via consumer banks. Likely e-mortgage would be provided by central bank directly.

Won't it lead to less accurate pricing of loans if there is only one central actor using rigid rules (needed to appear fair)?

Fiat currency already means the supply side of capital is detached from anything in reality. Remember price is where supply and demand meet, and interest rate is the price of capital. Central planning of the currency market, just like DDR had central planning of the car market with the Trabant.

With central banking, the supply can be infinite, and that’s what we Swedes are seeing with NEGATIVE interest rates. Jyske Bank in DK borrows to consumers house loans where you are paid to borrow. It can not end well, please someone show me logically/from first principle how it ever can.

The central actor can use the exact same rules that they currently make the lenders use.

Peer 2 peer loans are a thing.

What is bad news for banks is bad news for borrowers.

Is the sector more louche than any other?

I went to a presentation by the working group behind this. It seemed like a shitshow. Maybe they’ve gained a lot of competence in a short time. Or maybe they are accelerating this to cement the negative interest rates, which could be more urgent if they keep spending on the pandemic.

bitcoin solves nothing, worse it empower the "wanting to become millionaire overnight" syndrome that plagues our society

this world is horrible when you look into the details, working and helping other people is not rewarded at all

profiting from other people is what best people can do to have a better time on this planet

The market economy in fact solves many problems of 'helping other people' that we have just become so used to that we don't appreciate its complexity.

The fact that food is produced in abundance and is distributed in time to population centres for convenient consumption is a marvel of the modern world. And we're only getting better at it over time.

That's helping people.

"That's helping people" doesn't really say anything. It's extremely vague. Moreover, it's clear that not everyone helped since abject poverty and hunger are a thing, regardless of where you live.

You might be conflating "helping people" with "convenience" whereas what you truly want to say that "market economy" has made products/services "affordable". But, that's, again, not an inclusive statement. Markets only offer access to goods/services to the extent that actors are able to afford them. And clearly not everyone can afford to buy enough sustenance on a daily basis to not go hungry.

The same is true for being able to afford to attain equitable prices as a seller. If you can't bring enough leverage to the table, you will have to accept price levels as they are determined by bigger players who dominate market supply. It might mean that you get out priced, and that your business proposition - no matter how good the idea was - simply won't generate revenue because someone else can provide the same thing for less then peanuts.

Both cryptocurrency and food are the epitomes of that.

Massive amounts of food are being produced to the extent that there's massive amounts of waste across the entire supply chain. None of that happens out of charitable or altruistic intentions. It's not even produced for your personal convenience as a customer.

Flooding markets with massive amounts of supply is a strategy aimed to drive the prices down to a point where competitors have to call it quits. The aim/risk is to generate a razor thin margin which is still worth the investment. At the scale of global markets, that's still billions of dollars worth in profits.

The same is true for cryptocurrency. The price on cryptomarkets isn't determined by the many hands who hold fractions, it's determined by those who have invested the largest amounts of leverage. And they will use that to influence the prices if the incentive for scalping profit and/or acquiring/controlling a larger share of a scarce/finite resource becomes too enticing.

"Market economy" only helps certain groups in certain circumstances. It's definitely not an equitable way of "helping people". On the contrary.

> "That's helping people" doesn't really say anything. It's extremely vague. Moreover, it's clear that not everyone helped since abject poverty and hunger are a thing, regardless of where you live.

this is less true than it has ever been in human history; the only places with true famines in the modern world are those cut off from global markets by war, or dysfunctional states that are cut off from global markets like NK. your statement is either willful blindness or some kind of bone-deep cynicism -- "nothing good has happened because bad things still exist".

> true famines

Beware of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

Here's some sources about food insecurity in the United States:

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-... [2] https://time.com/4477157/hunger-america-history/ [3] https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/short-history-snap [4] https://www.nap.edu/read/11578/chapter/4 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

I could continue on. There are entire libraries filled by countless research and public policy programs with studies and monographs on the subject.

And that's just the United States.

Hunger is a massive issue anywhere in the world. And I will bring this to the table as an established fact whenever someone praises the virtues of a concept as vaguely defined as "market economics" while omitting the realities.

> your statement is either willful blindness or some kind of bone-deep cynicism

I'm unwilling to discuss this any further having being called "blind" and "cynic".

> "nothing good has happened because bad things still exist"

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=deaths+by+starvatio...

That argument is a golden hammer. It can be used to render any point moot.

"People die in car crashes", "People don't have access or can't pay for healthcare", "Student debt is a massive problem", "Home ownership has become prohibitively expensive"

"Nothing good has happened because bad things still exists."

Sure, good has happened. But I'm pointing out that the "good" part shouldn't be prioritized as an absolute, nor used as an excuse to look away from the "bad things".

Read my comment again. I concluded with:

> "Market economy" only helps certain groups in certain circumstances. It's definitely not an equitable way of "helping people". On the contrary.

The first sentence literally acknowledges the "good part", the second sentence points out that this isn't an absolute and that glaring issues are facing humanity eye-to-eye.

Beyond that, I could intepret "nothing good has happened because bad things exist" as another way of you, for whatever reasons, just trying to outright hand wave the very real concerns I've put on the table.

In which case, I, for my part, am entirely unwilling to continue this discussion.

there are plenty of valid, piercing critiques of capitalism or markets, ways to highlight that things they have degraded and destroyed -- and yet you chose a critique that is not only less true than it has ever been, it is increasingly untrue as time goes on. you are shouting at the rising tide for leaving the beach dry. every system of production besides globalized markets has decisively, harshly more murderous and brutally malthusian than the present arrangement. i can only interpret this critique as a rationalization for feelings you are unable to interrogate rationally. your ability to evaluate truth is diminished by your emotions; you have a despair or hopelessness searching for its cause.

The current Bitcoin narrative and actual usage does nothing for the "market economy" though. It might have some indirect positive effects by forcing governments to adopt more open policies lest they suffer from capital flight and forming of parallel economies, but that's about it. Decentralized stablecoins on the other hand have great potential to amplify the free market economy.

that's a great point, but. Just like the moon landing, some degree of food security in the "first world" countries has been achieved many decades ago now. Maybe it's time for some new achievements, like, i dunno, security against mystery viruses, or something else to write home about?

It didn’t feel all that secure in March of last year.

And I mean, the MRNA vaccine seems pretty amazing that rollout began worldwide in less than a year from a novel coronavirus popping up. But the same people working in agriculture aren’t working on virus research. The market decides where to allocate resources, are you advocating for some sort of central planning in lieu of this? What would a different system look like that doesn’t have the major pitfalls that the Soviet government had, where strange things happened like nearly hunting whales to extinction because they needed to make the 1967 whale oil quota?

Yes. I think your comment points out a big issue in our societies. However, note that the article isn't about Bitcoin.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) basically operate with a centralized database; no "mining", no pseudo-anonymity, most important, no gambling-like course changes. It represents the "offline money" 1:1, only is it managed centralized rather than federalized by many banks.

Wouldn't that also mean perfect visibility into the movement of money, and the death of cash?

Seems to me that perfect visibility into funds will be as deleterious to society as perfect law enforcement. How are you going to lead the next BLM, or LGBTQ rights, or just a plain old revolution when you can't fund anything?

There was a time, not long ago, when being gay was actually against the law. Imagine wanting to build a civil rights organization for homosexuals, but being unable to fund it because the government immediately and exactly knows which people associated with such a criminal enterprise.

I'm just diving into digital money to be honest, I'd be very happy if somebody had information on this topic.

My gut feeling is that these are societal issues beyond the mere implementation of money. You could have policies that protect donors of societal organizations and automatically wipe associated records.

I think the reality now is that big money is being laundered and stolen from society by big corporations. At the same time it's an illusion that citizens have anonymity in our daily endeavors.

Look at Bitcoin. Pushed by anarcho-romantic illusions, it's the dream of non-regulated big money gambling that hurts society...

We should focus on making our society robust, open and inclusive instead of thinking that we need some decentralized crypto solution.

My point is, in reality we now trust multiple layers of private banks, payment providers like Visa & MasterCard, Google Pay and Paypal.

These are known to give a fuck about society, shutting down things as they like, and even bringing US jurisdiction into other societies.

The advantages of anonymous payments are purely hypothetical for normal people and only benefit big players. Having digital central bank money would enable us to cut off the private money industry that makes a living with data analysis.

I would much prefer to have a state run a bank. As they are very less likely to arbitrary cut of my access. And on other hand they can already order any operator in the area to hand over them the details of what I have done in past years...

Yes it would mean exactly that.

BLM and LGBTQP is already supported by the state. The army and police join the pride parade, and last summer a Swedish policewoman kneeled down for rioting foreigners with the sign “white silence is violence”. Those movements represent the establishment.

In Sweden, nationalists, libertarians, and conservatives are hounded by the state.

Well, I'm not sure about Bitcoin but in general cryptocurrency has a purpose. I know I'm naive in this regard but only recent events with private companies banning people from communication channels in some way opened my eyes.

If you look closely there is no way to send or receive digital payment without using a private company service, which in turn can terminate it's services for you for arbitrary reasons, other people will just shrug and say it's a private company.

Physical currency right now has unique abilities not mirrored by any digital equivalent and allows one to survive and exchange money p2p even if ones name will be blacklisted by private companies for some reason. Yes, probability of this kind of event could be incredibly low but it's still there and I believe that it can increase with various attempts to build "credit score" systems.

I am not even that old and I remember a time when every small city had 4 banks right next to eachother. All gone.

Now banking is an app. Haven't used cash since forever- you have to literally google maps the nearest ATM.

Country? Here (Spain) many places do take cards/contactless but it's usually 'broken' under E100 or they just simply refuse anything but cash. Eveyone has wads of cash etc.

And not only 'the south', Berlin (Germany) has it too; many places don't take cards; they insist on cash.

If you love freedom, like very few of us Swedes do, use non-traceable and uncensorable payments like cash.

> “Nothing you buy will be anonymous,” he said, adding a positive outcome would be that it is harder for criminals to evade detection or anti-money laundering controls

But centrally issued digital cash can be anonymous. There exist cryptographic schemes where tokens can be exchanged peer-to-peer in a way where the issuing bank can't identify participants until tokens are double spent. Double spends can then be charged against the account of the double spender when the recipient of a transaction deposits the tokens. These schemes are far more efficient, natural progression to our current fiat monetary system than Bitcoin or any of the other "crypto currencies".

The only reason we don't have this tech today is there are no incentives for our governments or banks to maintain the anonymity of cash.

https://archive.org/details/CryptographyOfAnonymousElectroni...

What happens when grandma can't figure out where her payment went, does she ring the central bank?

Yep, central bank as monopoly with ordinary call-centre, likely outsourced.

We just fork the generations here, let grandma die with the old system.

More details on e-krona at the official site [1].

[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/

> “If you have a bank account but you can - at the click of a button - move your money to the central bank ... that could risk instability in the system,” Yazdi said.

> Riksbank Deputy Governor Cecilia Skingsley has dismissed such concerns, saying people can already exit the banking system by buying treasury bills.

Not sure about Sweden but I don't believe many retail banks make buying t-bills as easy as a click of a button, unless you were using their brokerage.

Few laymen are excited about converting their cash to t-bills. But digital currencies like CBDCs are part of the cryptocurrency wave that has a lot more of the general population interested.

This video explains pretty clearly why bankers in Sweden thinks this is a bad idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK1DZlWaiLY

I think you would not deposit your money at the Riksbank, they would issue it but you would need to store it somewhere? Existing banks could offer that, but for a service charge, which would basically mean negative interest. For that reason, this is a less attractive option for storing more than pocket-money and the fear that banks would lose business might be exaggregated.

I have been studying Real-Time Gross Settlement systems for the past two months, including questions of liquidity in settlement systems. The question at the heart of the banking system is quite simple, if banks take capital from customers and use it to provide debt to others, then how much money should they keep on hand for their customers' withdrawals and transfers?

This question is hard to answer. As there is a conflict between what the bank does (i.e. provide debt), and how it is supposed to provide it (by taking savings etc.). Everything else, from central banks "offering cheap liquidity" is an add on. They are mechanisms that allow - for example, a bank to easily borrow this money so that they can cancel it out/repay it from transactions coming into their banks.

What makes it all borked is that you can't trust bankers with their grandmas. If there is a flaw, they will exploit it. Every major change has led to an exploit. E.g. In 1918, the American Government introduced the Leased Wire System that used the telegraphs and a network of 12 Reserves to allow banks to transct with each other across CONUS. It reduced the average time for cheques to be cashed in at banks across the country from 5.4 days in 1912 to just 2.4 days. Theoretically, this reduced the risk taken by banks when they transacted with unknown banks across the country, with the Government acting as the escrow. It catalysed innovation and led to an explosion of financial services across the young country.

The system was supposed to be foolproof by reducing the time "credit" was needed to make transactions. Essentially, until one bank sent the money and the other got it, they were operating on a system of credit. And they would "net" the books at the end of the day/week to physically transfer assets. FedWire (Leased Wire System) made everyone feel safe by sending notes of the transactions across great distances. But the netting still took time. All it took was one bank to fall behind on current obligations to other banks for all of the banks to collapse, leading to the Great Depression.

Important people got together and made rule changes to fix the problem. But then they innovated again. The Federal Reserve started making Automatic Clearing Houses (ACHs) and Remote Check Processing Centres (RCPCs) to make settlement faster, starting in the 60s and precipitating in 1972. This made settlement faster therefore safer. And it led to great financial innovation. The magic of computers and innovation meant that people could use these same systems to transact across the world!

Until in 1974, when the German lender Herstatt collapsed due foreign exchange investments based in the Dollar, which caused the bank to fail to meet its settlement obligations...

> That day, a number of banks had released payment of Deutsche Marks (DEM) to Herstatt in Frankfurt in exchange for US dollars (USD) that were to be delivered in New York. The bank was closed at 16:30 German time, which was 10:30 New York time. Because of time zone differences, Herstatt ceased operations between the times of the respective payments. The counterparty banks did not receive their USD payments

This is a simplified history. But the history of banking is the history of doing settlement while managing liquidity and counter-party risk.

No one can predict how this will turn out. But we shouldn't cheer the government cutting out the middleman and going into the business of settlement and direct debt themselves. The Great Collapse of 2034 might be precipitated by it.

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/blog/2020/09/check-processing-...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke201...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_risk

Yet another plus in the book for Sweden. If banks as we know them today does start to die out it's another huge win.

You might need to think about that in more depth