<story><title>Swiss to vote on preventing cashless society, pressure group says</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/swiss-vote-preventing-cashless-society-pressure-group-says-2023-02-06/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nhchris</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s more than just fees and surveillance. It means you need permission for each transaction. Permission to buy a loaf of bread, a taxi ride, a train ticket. And even Canada does things such as freeze protester&amp;#x27;s bank accounts without trial. Let&amp;#x27;s not make it &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; easy for them, shall we?</text></item><item><author>traspler</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m Swiss and try to be as cashless as possible but I can absolutely understand people &amp;amp; businesses opposing a completely cashless future under the assumption that the current situation remains.
The fees associated with the current system are exorbitant. Credit cards, as expected, have a pretty high fee of like 2.5% or more for the accepting business and the new Visa&amp;#x2F;Mastercard debit cards that they force on everyone have even more egregious fees of CHF 0.5 to 0.95 + 1.5% per transaction. Twint (our digital payment app) also has ~1.5% in fees per transaction and the business case of Twint is to farm as much payment data of the customers as possible for analysis and offers&amp;#x2F;ads.
I do like the convenience of cashless but the cost in fees for businesses and the increased interest in exploiting my transaction history for an ads business sours this a bit for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>And not just that...&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d mention ukraine, but even in peace time, there can be huge power outages in relatively large areas (as in US, more than one in the recent years), where point of sale terminals stop working, there is no internet connection to process the transaction, but exchanging a few bills, for whatever you need always works, even in the dark.&lt;p&gt;Also privacy... Want to buy a huge buttplug from a &amp;quot;Huge buttplug store ltd.&amp;quot;, but your government could collapse in a few years and the new one might not like people (especially guys) using huge buttplugs? With cash, there&amp;#x27;s nothing to trace... with cards, the government can get a list of names in few seconds.</text></comment>
<story><title>Swiss to vote on preventing cashless society, pressure group says</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/swiss-vote-preventing-cashless-society-pressure-group-says-2023-02-06/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nhchris</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s more than just fees and surveillance. It means you need permission for each transaction. Permission to buy a loaf of bread, a taxi ride, a train ticket. And even Canada does things such as freeze protester&amp;#x27;s bank accounts without trial. Let&amp;#x27;s not make it &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; easy for them, shall we?</text></item><item><author>traspler</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m Swiss and try to be as cashless as possible but I can absolutely understand people &amp;amp; businesses opposing a completely cashless future under the assumption that the current situation remains.
The fees associated with the current system are exorbitant. Credit cards, as expected, have a pretty high fee of like 2.5% or more for the accepting business and the new Visa&amp;#x2F;Mastercard debit cards that they force on everyone have even more egregious fees of CHF 0.5 to 0.95 + 1.5% per transaction. Twint (our digital payment app) also has ~1.5% in fees per transaction and the business case of Twint is to farm as much payment data of the customers as possible for analysis and offers&amp;#x2F;ads.
I do like the convenience of cashless but the cost in fees for businesses and the increased interest in exploiting my transaction history for an ads business sours this a bit for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>There are other options than the credit&amp;#x2F;debit card model.&lt;p&gt;NFC secure area base locally stored accounts are a pretty good compromise for instance. The account is locally encrypted, anonymous, with a ceiling on the max charge. You’ll pay for bread with no latency, and will only hit the network at charge time and&amp;#x2F;or if you need to for backup.</text></comment>