Best Bitcoin Card for Sweden
The Swedish central bank is the oldest in the world. It once invented paper money. Now it is the first central bank to want to introduce its own digital currency.
Recently, all 4.8 million Swedish households received mail from their government. More precisely, from the Civil Protection Agency. She had a ten-page brochure distributed nationwide with the threatening title “When the crisis or war comes”. The last time this had happened was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many Swedes had been worried or at least surprised by this in the past weeks by leafing through the little booklet. But this is not about the world political background that led to the new edition of the brochure. It’s about the checklist, which is printed at the end: Everything you need in case of an emergency. Potatoes and nuts, tins of salmon balls and mackerel, water canisters and blankets, petrol and medicines. And cash.
The last point is particularly important in Sweden. Most Swedes have already said goodbye to coins and banknotes in their everyday lives. The kingdom in the north is the pioneer of international development in this respect. According to surveys, only one in four Swedes still takes cash at least once a week. 85 percent of all transactions are carried out online, with credit cards or with a payment app. Even the church receives the collection in many places in Sweden without cash. Often you can’t pay any other way. Even simple bakeries have signs with the inscription “Bargeldloses Geschäft” in their shop windows. The smartest forecasts are that by 2025 the Swedes could have become a completely cashless society.
Compared to German customs, this is a tremendously progressive thing. However, the trend is not only a problem for the civil protectionists, who are concerned about the stability of the payment system in the event of a power failure, server shutdowns or Internet connections being disconnected. One problem is Sweden’s turning away from cash for the Reichsbank, the country’s central bank – and not just in the event of a crisis, but in peaceful everyday life.
The E-Crown is being planned
The bank is concerned here with the fundamentals, namely the difference between central bank money, i.e. the notes and coins issued by a central bank, and the so-called “giral money”, which commercial banks are allowed to draw on for lending purposes, for example, as long as they deposit a minimum reserve with their central bank. So far, cashless payment transactions have only functioned with such giro money. But it is quite possible that the Swedish Riksbank will soon change this: It is currently working on an e-crown, its own electronic currency. This could lead to every Swedish citizen soon having an account with the central bank and no longer having to rely on the services of commercial banks for cashless transactions. A kind of Bitcoin, but with the blessing of the Central Bank. So far there is no such thing anywhere in the world.