[cturner]

I don't think this is a strong argument. Physical cash is on the way out. You can do payments through mastercard/visa lines, and wired transfers are straightforward. FX conversions are straightforward when everyone has a phone. In 2007 I had a situation where I was being paid in Australia, but living in London. I used the lines on my cards for that year, and don't remember it being inconvenient.

[rwmj]

My bank makes me use a terrible rate and then adds a £1.50 charge on top, every time I use my card in the rest of Europe. So I'm still looking for good deals on Euros and carrying large amounts of cash when I go.

[rtpg]

the EU could simply force banks to let you withdraw at market rates at any ATM

[JumpCrisscross]

> the EU could simply force banks to let you withdraw at market rates at any ATM

Even for liquid assets with centralized trading reporting, e.g. stocks listed on the NYSE, determining the "market" price is an academic pursuit. (The last traded price for any size? A similar size? The bid or ask? Immediate-execution price or sliced-up execution price? Et cetera.)

For foreign exchange, where trades aren't necessarily reported and occur, de-centralised, at a myriad of international venues and where infrequently-traded currency pairs have a habit of jerking around, such a regulation would be quite tedious to comply with.

[21]

Forex is way bigger than any stock market.

I traded forex for many years, and there would absolutely be no problem with this. There are plenty of web-sites where you can see real-time rates.

Of course, I know where to look (big retail forex trading sites are a good choice). General public would probably find something like Yahoo Finance which is not good for this.

[majewsky]

There was a huge pushback from banks a few years ago when transaction fees at German ATMs were capped to (AFAIK) € 1,90.

The argument from banks is that there are a lot of online-only banks that rely on the ATMs of banks with physical branches in a parasitic manner.

[hocuspocus]

And online banks like N26 complain in turn that Germany has the most expensive ATM fees in Europe. It sounds like a bullshit argument given that operational costs for an ATM are mostly fixed.

[kazen44]

in the netherlands they are trying to solve this issue by making ATM's standardized and not bank-dependant.

Which seems like a far saner way to do it imo.

[hocuspocus]

Check out Revolut, Monzo, Starling or Transferwise.

[Silhouette]

Physical cash is on the way out.

People have been saying that for a long time, but one catastrophe after another with the alternatives reminds us that sometimes having a simple, reliable, anonymous means of paying for things isn't such a bad idea after all.

I'm in the UK. A major bank here has just spectacularly screwed up a migration to a new IT system, and for several weeks many people and businesses have been unable to use the most basic and essential facilities. Just this past week, Visa had a major outage and people were unable to buy food in shops or fill up their vehicles. While those were particularly bad instances of things going wrong, it's not as if we couldn't find many more examples going further back as well.

Obviously cash has its own downsides, particularly around counterfeit currency and the costs of handling and securing it. There is no perfect solution to making payments. But I suspect predictions of an entirely cashless society are still a long way from becoming reality for most of us.

You can do payments through mastercard/visa lines, and wired transfers are straightforward.

That very much depends on where you are and where the business or person you want to pay is. In some places, electronic transfers are quick and easy. In some parts of the world, they are expensive, slow, and rely on technology that feels like it came from another era.

The major card networks are the single biggest blight on the payment landscape, because they suck in almost every conceivable way except for being so widely established, but that last point means disrupting them is a very tall order.

FX conversions are straightforward when everyone has a phone.

But many people won't bother to do that conversion. If you're advertising prices in your native currency and your customer has a different currency, that can be a huge barrier to conversion. Most people don't know or care even roughly how much of their local currency equals the advertised price in yours. This effect is at least moderated if you're advertising in a very big currency that some people have encountered before, which basically means the US dollar or Euro if you're in the West.

[ironcan]

There'd still be a mental overhead though, and it's notwithstanding the fact that the euro is more than twenty years old, at a time where paying by credit card often meant someone was physically copying your card number and details so it's unsurprising that they didn't account for that fact.

[wazoox]

In Germany, in most places you can't pay with anything but cash, or a card called EC for "Electronic Cash". No credit card. At all. Even for large amounts. They're still healing the wounds for 1922/23 hyper-inflation.

The Germans clearly have a very peculiar relationship with money. Giving them control of the Euro was therefore a very dangerous idea.