Another Sweden here. While I agree with @csvan that there's a fair bit of hyperbole in the article, it's not entirely wrong. Swedish society is increasingly moving away from cash transactions, and instead relying on various other ways of payment.

For example: on Tredje Långgatan (a popular street) in Gothenburg, most (all?) restaurants have a policy to not accept cash at all. I've seen this at many other places as well, and certainly not just in Gothenburg.

Another example is this summer when I went to see a concert and wanted to buy ear plugs, since I'd forgotten to do it earlier. The seller I spoke with outside the stadium didn't accept cash, but instead used something called Swish. It's a way to send money with your phone – kind of like Venmo I guess.

The move to a cash-less society has been ongoing for some time, and communal services such as busses and trains in many cities gave up on cash several years ago.

For the most part I think a move to a cash-less (as in physical moneys) is a good move. The problems I have personally seen and been affected by, although not enough to care for paper moneys, are:

- Smaller shops not accepting card purchases below a certain amount, or passing on the processing fee on to the consumer (probably against their contracts)
- Banks being very reluctant to handle cash from business; either making it very difficult by imposing strange limits (only a certain amount accepted per day/week,) or imposing expensive handling fees, or both
- Being a tourist in a city where you can't easily pay bus fare makes it difficult to get around; for the record: Gothenburg is the only city in Sweden I've seen that gets this right by having card machines on trams, while my home town of Stockholm is a lesson in absurdity when trying to pay the fare

I think the positives currently outweigh the negatives, but as more and more services go cash-less, problems start to show. For instance there have been several high-profile outages where it's been impossible for people to make payments, because the systems are down for an extend period of time. Cash may be expensive to deal with, but you can't (currently) beat it when your internet connection goes down.

Currently, all significant alternatives to using cash in Sweden are technically more or less the same. Swish may have a different user experience, but the payments are still processed by banks and so face the same problems of stability. In fact, the product is proprietary and owned by a company called Getswish AB – a private company owned by major Swedish banks.

Aside from uptime, cash has the benefit of being a point-to-point method of payment, not involving a third party. Swish, cards, and other forms of payments that play any significant role in Swedish society all involve a third party (usually banks.) There are obvious privacy concerns with this, but moreover it also means because the third party authorizes the transaction you can be shut down at any moment and for any reason. Sure, you might have legal options, but that's of little help when you have to buy food and all your money is locked away – possibly due to glitches.

Also, what happens when the banks fail more permanently? Sucks to lose your money, sure, but it sucks even more for the economy at large when there's no way to move money around. It further cements the "need" for big banks in society, since they effectively own the transactions when there's no way to make them without the banks.

I am concerned, but mostly for reasons other than the ones in that article, which seems to treat cash as some magical asset that isn't really affected by interest rates.