There's an enormous hole in this conversation. Everyone is talking about malevolent government, data collection and cybernetic social control as the great threa

There's an enormous hole in this conversation. Everyone is talking about malevolent government, data collection and cybernetic social control as the great threats. Yes, these things are frightening. Authoritarianism/fascism or surveillance capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is in the rise. But malevolence is the lesser of our worries with regard to the prospect of a "cashless society". Cash is important not only because (as others have said) it is a mature, near perfect technology that provides fluidity, anonymity etc. It's important because it's a distributable store of highly resilient wealth. Physical cash is one of the greatest defences a society has against total civil disintegration - the kind of "worst fears" we are all terrified of when the pandemic or Capitol riots were looming. People in the streets with guns killing each other over a loaf of bread. It's the sort of thing we worry EMP attacks, nuclear war, overnight hyper-inflation would bring. When chaos comes it can come very quick. One of the surest and fastest routes to a totally precarious civilisation is to create a "cashless society" than runs on these highly unstable and very new-fangled things we call computers (we've had them "properly" for about 20 or 30 years). Imagine that there is no physical cash at all. Cash acts as a buffer, like power-supply smoothing capacitors. One day the systems all switch off (a very likely scenario (some time - we don't know when) by all cyber-threat accounts). Modern people, within one or two generations, are losing the ability to value or barter things, or do simple mental arithmetic in many cases. That level of dependency is catastrophic. Fortunately we still teach how to add up money and caculate change at schools. When no-one can buy food, and no-one can fuel vehicles because the "system is down", watch it all descend into madness within 24 hours. And no, the police/national-guard won't help. They'll all be shitting themselves too and worrying about their families, getting paid. Ayn Rand (not someone I am very fond of) made at least a few rather intelligent philosophical observations, one of which is that (I paraphrase) "money is a peace-keeping instrument". Cash gives a society it's own form of distributed "power" which allows a momentum of local exchange and flexibility. There only needs to be a few tens of millions in circulation. Right now most folk have a few hundred bucks at home or on their person. Without it your fallback is, within days, only people who have stores of gold, medicines and weapons being fucntional. That might be great for "preppy" survivalist types, but it's not a world I'd like to live in. Any government that eliminates physical cash entirely would be clinically insane and playing a very, very dangerous game. Given all the cyber-threats movement toward a "cashless society" is utterly premature from a safety perspective, regardless any social politics.