The primary reason to use cash or otherwise anonymous means of payment as much as possible is to allow for incomplete enforcement of laws. Quite literally, to e

The primary reason to use cash or otherwise anonymous means of payment as much as possible is to allow for incomplete enforcement of laws. Quite literally, to enable free trade. We don't want perfect enforcement of the law. It doesn't allow for progression towards a better state of being. It's as if you just cement your current way of life forever with very limited movement permitted per cycle. For example, imagine if we had ubiquitous mass surveillance in the 1960s and the processing power to back it to the degree that we do now. Homosexuality would probably still be illegal because no-one would have been able to form the movement to change that. Being able to do something that is (currently) illegal is a strictly preferable state of affairs to having it be completely impossible. Imagine that you just couldn't transfer money to a friend because the Government has strictly delineated between businesses and "consumers" because that's the 90%+ use case and it doesn't really affect the aggregate economy that much to just ban individual-individual transfers. e.g. "Using a card is more convenient cause I just do a tap on the machine". Except no, it's not, because only businesses have card terminals. So you're restricting the free flow of trade over time. Each individual 'outside of the norm' use case is quite small, all of them added together is massive.