Swede here – it's national news whenever any of the payment systems go down. In particular the big bank initiative Swish, which seemingly tend to not cope well with high density situations such as concerts and festivals, garners criticism whenever it goes down since it's advertised as "the alternative to cash." What scares me the most about it is that the system is designed to have you give up control, under the guise of "making your life easier." Tin-foil hat warning perhaps, but fact of the matter is that these institutions (in which I include the government) have shown over and over again why they can't be trusted, not least because when they "make a mistake" it's always the rest of us that end up in the shit for it. You're asked to just deal with it, with little recourse.

I'm all for abandoning physical cash, but we're nowhere near having solved all of the questions, and the current alternatives available in Sweden are demonstrably worse than cash – despite the latter's shortcomings.