I’d never hear of Swish until I googled it. The Swedes can’t just cut off the rest of the world as far as card payments are concerned. As I say, my Wife and I both used our Starling debit cards for absolutely every single purchase we made, and that included the local Coop in the town where we were staying, yes, you read that right, they do have Coop’s in Sweden!
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Just don’t ever be tempted to do that in some of the poorest countries in the world for obvious reasons!
A couple of weeks back, I was in Salisbury walking past the Cathedral steps. I’ll have to be slightly diplomatic here about how I say this, but put it this way, there were a number of people sat on the steps there actively begging and in some cases hurling insults at people who wouldn’t turn out a few pence. That sort of thing just goes over my own head, so I am able to ignore it. Whether folks think I’m right or wrong, I never give money to anyone on the street because I used to do a job which gave me enough insight to know exactly what happened to the vast majority of the money given by folks who thought that they were being kind. I think you’ll get my drift.
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I used to work in the Netherlands and was approached at night by a woman asking in Dutch if I could spare any change. I was a little startled as it was dark and the rain was making me hurry. I obviously looked perplexed although I understood her, so she asked again in English. I mumbled that I hadn’t got any change and hurried on. I have regretted that ever since. I didn’t have any change but I could have got her a meal. What a lesson. R-
You are aware, of course, that you cannot access Swish unless you have a Swedish bank account and are domiciled there? And yes, I can imagine an ecosystem being set up where only high end shops accept non-local cash alternatives. Happens already in the Netherlands.
Uber takes card 
So does Bolt !
Being able to bribe people is not something I regularly think about namely because I think if they don’t follow the rules of their important job then A) they’re not trustworthy and should be fired/arrested and tried for bribery and B) undermine the trust in a country’s systems
Swish is pretty widely accepted so some merchants definitely could especially outside of Stockholm
IMO I have no problem with them doing this but they’d have to open it to foreigner sign-ups instead of locking it to Swedish ID / phone number holders
Should call the police (101, of course), active begging isn’t legal and hurling insults at someone could be a breach of the peace
Yes I’m aware of it
These don’t exist
You’re not wrong, but thinking they’re wrong still won’t get you on the other side of the gate. 
Your points are all fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, its just that they’re points made inside a bubble of an ideal world that doesn’t exist.
uber doesn’t exist everywhere (and its a ripoff), you get a rickety cart with an engine, they don’t take card, because there’s no way to take card payments, they take cash. sometimes you need to pay people to leave you alone, they only take cash.
we’re all very comfy in our modern country
They very much do exist in a good portion of poor countries. Bolt’s whole thing is that they pretty much own African taxis because they started off as an Uber Fleets equivalent only (who hired engineers in poorer Eastern EU countries to cut down costs)
I won’t support a country where that’s commonplace; ask yourself if maybe “made inside a bubble of an ideal world that doesn’t exist” to you is the equivalent of “i willingly support criminals” to someone who would know this about countries and simply decide to not support that with my money, as it proliferates it.
the only reason they ask for it is because they know there’s leverage - if everyone boycott the country due to bribery they wouldn’t do it
Bolt, Uber and Grab exist pretty much everywhere and are cheap compared to your purchasing power standards + are safer (there’s a log of the journey owned by a foreign company that has a much larger image than defending random cabbies and no risk of overcharging at the end of the journey) than a lot of what you can find in poorer countries
Not everyone has the privilege of this choice
From the way you’ve discussed it it seems as if you’ve been going for leisure - so some indeed have a privilege of choice and it would cut these criminals’ salary by a significant chunk if all leisure visits stopped
For work. The people there don’t have a choice and there’s little choice if your there. Things are just done with cash
Uber doesn’t exist in most of Germany (just big cities like Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart). Germany, despite appearances, is still very much a cash economy, with I would say the majority of businesses only accept German issued Maestro Cards, if cards at all.
I’m sure a good amount of German “no foreign cards” are enforced by businesses rather than terminals. Just lie to them
And to mention, even Germany is going more towards being cashless than it used to be. The whole of the EU are aiming to become cashless
Saying Germany isn’t there yet isn’t meaningful. Yes it’s cash based now, so were we until we hit pretty much universal acceptance and suddenly boom