I recently bought a car in Sweden, my first actually. Just a regular 3 year old car, not the cheapest but far cheaper than the luxury cars (~$22k). After taking the car for a short drive we only had to pay, shouldn't be a big deal since I had all the money on my bank?

First I had to transfer the money from my savings account to my bank account, it's easy using my phone. But when I tried to it didn't work and told me the amount was to large. A cold shill ran down my spine, just the day before my girlfriend wanted me to prepare all transfers so we don't run into any problems with the payment but I said it was no problems. Luckily I could split up the transfer and move the full amount, crisis averted. I don't know why they have this limit when you can just circumvent it?

I was ready to pay with my VISA card but got told they couldn't accept payments this large. I didn't know they had a limit here as well? Some other car sellers allow card purchases and instead they make multiple payments. Imagine if you buy a really high end luxury car, you'll have to make spend the whole day just making payments! But alas here they didn't even accept it at all.

So instead they asked if I could pay using Swish, an app for direct payments very popular here in Sweden. Sure that sounded good, after all it's linked to my bank account where I have the money. Of course payments there are also limited. I could raise the weekly limit to $5k and also raise the limit temporarily to $15k. In the end I paid them half of the total amount using Swish. The good thing about Swish is you get a payment confirmation instantly.

Then I had to make a regular bank transfer to their account for the rest of the payment. This was easy although they would have to wait until the day after to get their payment confirmation, which is why they wanted to use Swish in the first place. If they didn't get the money they said they would call me the day after, but for now everything was done and we could drive off in our new car.

What lessons can we learn from this story and compare it to cryptocurrency usage?

There were several arbitrary max transfer limits making the payment much harder than necessary. These should be fully configurable by me and the merchant not globally enforced.

They didn't even accept payments by card. I did not ask exactly why but I would guess limited purchases and high fees.

Payment confirmation was missing/delayed for the bank transfer.

0-conf would have been fine here. After all if I wanted to steal the car it would've been easier to drive off with it when we took it for a test drive, they only took a photo of the drivers license.





If I had paid using a cryptocurrency it could have been done with a single payment and instant confirmation (0-conf is ok) for the seller. Even waiting 10min would be fine as there was a bunch of paperwork. Additionally using Bitcoin Cash the fees would've been negligible compared to paying with VISA, which I was planning to but couldn't do here.