Harry Sintonen21h ago

Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Estonia are soon enabling offline debit card payments for at least seven days without network connectivity. The change covers payments for essential goods in physical trade, such as food, medicine, and fuel. Each country has made - or is in the process of making - the required changes to their related regulations to enable it.

The motivation for this change is to enable payments even in exceptional situations such as network disruptions due to sabotage or conflict. TL;DR: You can pay for essentials even if Russia cuts the cables.

Plans for this change were announced in May 2025: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nordics-estonia-plan-offline-card-payment-back-up-if-internet-cut-2025-05-07/

#resilience #preparedness #infrastructure #payments #banking

Show threadViktoria D. Richards/Uddelhexe17h ago

@harrysintonen

Humanity already enabled this with physical money.

I mean: good that working internet is not required for paying with cards, but not making paying with actual money nearly impossible ( which would technically in the worst case not even need electricity) would have prevented making this new step necassary in the first place.

Show threadHarry Sintonen16h ago

@v_d_richards Fair point. Physical money has inherent costs though: minting the coins and printing the bills consumes limited natural resources. The coins and bill have a limited lifetime, too. Thus I think it was a good idea to move away from physical money.

Nordics have largely moved away from physical money. I still have a 50€ bill in a nook of my wallet for emergencies - I think it's nearly ten years old now.

Show threadViktoria D. Richards/Uddelhexe13h ago

@harrysintonen

Only paying digitally by lack of choice is dangerous in my opinion.

In times of crisis, cyber attack, war, natural desaster with potential black out of internet/ electricity, being as a society dependant on debit and Smartphones for transactions is an easy to attack single point of failure.

It also gives a government the potential complete control over people and is a tool for opression over citizens, when every payment is monitored.

Same goes for corporate tracking.

Show threadHarry Sintonen

@v_d_richards Going full monoculture would be dangerous, indeed. However, there will always be cash around, but not as much in circulation as before.

As to government control over people or tracking/monitoring payments: I'd hate to live in a society where I'd have to worry about this in my threat model. Luckily this seems rather unlikely in the nordic countries at least.

Corporate tracking can be dealt with careful planning and setup. While I originally didn't do this to avoid tracking it sure is nice to self-host as much as possible: https://infosec.exchange/@harrysintonen/115916299816297773

8:12pmWeb
Show threadViktoria D. Richards/Uddelhexe13h ago

@harrysintonen

I so much hope we will never find out how fascists will use everything to opress people.

I might be a bit pessimistic when i see how right wing parties all over Europe gain so much traction ( and in Germany of all places, where i live- which is so crazy) and how crazy dependant we are on the USA that are practically an oligarchy right now that can willy nilly deplatform european judges out of everyday life.

But you're right.
We can' t loose hope for better times.