Just to clarify, you cannot by train tickets with BTC, but you can buy BTC from train ticket machines. This service has been available for just a few months, and is provided by sweepay.ch.
BTC seems to be culturally accepted, and Switzerland is the home of Buterin and Ethereum as well.
I've also heard that some Swiss banks may soon incorporate BTC wallets into their e-banking solutions (they'll hold your keys for you).
Just thought I would finally add, I have a small service business in Vaud, and have been accepting BTC since 2013. I have yet to have a single person transact. Everybody pays with debit cards.
Switzerland's financial industry is really in need to reinvent itself (due to the banking secrecy being effectively gone). Not that I have much knowledge of the bitcoin economy, but offering services around this in a legally stable and trusted country seems to be a good idea. Swiss traditionally have a strong distrust in centralized authority (for >500 years it was a very decentrally organised alliance of 'city' states). I could even see replacing the Swiss Frank with a digital currency in the long run. In the digital age, giving much power back to localized states seems more and more compelling to me. Don't like health insurance system in city A? Hey their neighbouring town has you covered.
> Switzerland's financial industry is really in need to reinvent itself (due to the banking secrecy being effectively gone)
I take it you are neither Swiss nor familiar with our banks. The selling point isn't, and shouldn't be, secrecy. It is competent execution. At this, UBS, CS, Pictet et al are still king.
Don't kid yourself that secrecy was not the main driver for foreigners holding accounts in Switzerland. Those entities became good at what they do because for a long time they were the main option for people wanting to hide money (legitimate or illegitimate) and with that came the funding to hire people who were good at it.
I'm Swiss and would like to point you to Credit Suisse and UBSes growth curve. They'll stay for a long time, but these institutions are just not drivers of growth and innovation anymore, thus we need to rethink for the future.
>The selling point isn't, and shouldn't be, secrecy.
I'm definitely not Swiss nor do I know much about the banking system there. But in the US the secrecy of Swiss bank accounts was widely considered the only reason to have an account there. This was a Swiss stereotype in the US for a very long time.
For me the selling point is trustworthiness, not secrecy. I don't want my bank to share information about my balance and transactions with the US and other states.
That might help him to have an more objective POV. The market share on the gross national product declined ~50% the last ten years for the banking industry (without insurance industry). The reason for this might be manifold, but it doesn't need a lot to base it on the loss of the banking secrecy.
Coordinating and executing a reasonable amount of trades isn't easy. Sometimes the "planning" of it is very thin, and the execution is that makes difference.
For example, simply adjusting at that time some operation will be done has impact, since the currencies aren't fixed and change their trade value every second.
Yes, but that AFAIK still covers a majority of the Swiss private banking business. I have mixed feelings about that being lost because I see privacy as a human right, not just a right for Swiss citizens, on the other hand Switzerland isn't responsible to enforce our understanding of rights for non-residents.
In any case, I think it's obviously necessary for our banking industry to reinvent itself, if they ever want to be as relevant and profitable as pre-2008. Just as one indicator, their earnings per share dabbles around one quarter to one sixth to what they had ever since. Revenues look very similarly, around one quarter of what they had (maybe more, I can only look back 10 years since I don't pay money for this kind of data).
Point is, Swiss banking can either keep dabbling around in the less profitable and hardly growing woods, or they can charge into new territory, whatever that is.
The insurance is only one component of a healthcare system though. What I have in mind is a decentralisation of the whole system (which is distinct from a privatization though, which I oppose for the most part). Allow me to explain.
Here's the components of a health system as I see it:
* infrastructure in general, I'd call them infrastructure nodes. These would be hospitals, clinics, ambulance services, care services or even preventive institutions such as public sports grounds, public cantinas or public tooth brushing lessons. In fact I'd extend this to every piece of infrastructure where free market doesn't work due to economic hazards, both unwanted (monopolies, asymmetric information, ..) and wanted (nurses and doctors who go the extra mile for each patient instead of being forced to go by the numbers only). So this includes roads, airports, public transport at least in less dense areas, electric infrastructure, emergency services etc.
* tracking of health conditions & outcomes and transparent data, for each infrastructure node above a certain size.
* a health care cost model that's centrally governed (luckily we have that already in Switzerland).
* a certification system for infrastructure nodes above a certain size that's centrally governed (so everyone can still start one).
* a tax system that I can subscribe to that includes access to a specific set of infrastructure nodes (others are still available, but need to be payed individually according to the steered cost model). This essentially forms a virtual commune. This being bound to local or regional areas may often still make sense, but there could be other models, for example business travellers could subscribe to an 'all-cities-and-interconnects-included' model. These are basically just funds that anyone or any organisation can start to manage, that has inflow (taxes) and outflow (payments to each infrastructure node for their provided services according to the tracked data). You can also look at this as a privatisation of local government.
* policies by either big reinsurance firms or the central government that back these decentralised tax funds. Essentially, a potentially decentralised / privatised version of the cantonal fiscal balancing.
* mandatory public education where everyone can learn about what makes up infrastructure nodes and why or if we need each one, so everyone can make informed decisions about which tax fund to subscribe to.
* a basic tax fund operated by 'classic' government that allow people to stabilise their economic situation (and allow their dependents the highest education) if they fall through the cracks of the system. This would also fund everything that still needs to be kept centralised, such as a military. Financing this could be done through VAT or through to-be-defined tax flows from each private tax fund into this basic fund.
After you're done with this, together with crypto currency, you could have a really small central and local government. Military and police would probably be the number one cost drivers there, but that's maybe 30% of what we have now.
Also, many fintech startups a hiring engineers like crazy.
(I live in Zurich and I am a well-connected programmer. If you are thinking to get a coding job here, feel free to contact me. You find my email address in my HN profile or here: https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)