In Sweden, some churches and even beggars only take card payments

Sweden has spent years running one of the fastest transitions to a cashless society anywhere in the world — the share of cash in everyday purchases there has dropped to a fraction of a percent of all payments.

The twist: this shift away from cash has gone so far that some churches installed card readers at the collection plate, and some street beggars in bigger cities started carrying their own small card terminals — simply because passersby stopped carrying physical money altogether.

Paradoxically, Sweden's central bank has started actively encouraging citizens not to give up cash entirely — worried that in the event of a digital systems failure, a cyberattack, or a power outage, the country could be left with no working means of payment at all.

The stakes: Sweden shows the extreme edge of a process happening, to a lesser degree, pretty much everywhere in the world — physical money, which for millennia was the very definition of "money," could vanish from everyday life faster than anyone expected.