Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons.
We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.
The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.
We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.
The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.