The time between now and the 2040 of this article is much shorter than between now and the first time I heard we were going to become a cashless society. There are really only “good” reasons for going cashless if you’re the government, cash is expensive to produce, can be counterfeited, and is largely untraceable. For everybody that isn’t the government though it has a few big wins: fast, easy, and largely untraceable. Or on the consumerist side the reasons we use cash are: illegal things, small things, vending machines, bars, and yard sales. Nothing works better for those types of transactions than cash, and most of us participate in at least two of them on a fairly regular basis.
Now it’s possible the government will decide to stop giving in to our demands. But as long as they decide to be at least a little user friendly cash is staying until somebody comes up with something at least as fast, at least as easy AND at least as untraceable. Those chits I mentioned earlier would be about the only thing I can see doing it, but much like the RFID credit card in the RFID grocery store Visa commercial the logistical challenges for something like those chits are epic. You’d need them to be able to talk to all the banks, through all the ATMs, and all the computers, and all the smartphones, and all the cash registers, and they need to talk to all of each other (without having to talk to banks), and people will want to be able to add some security, but they’re also going to want to be able to ignore the security. All of it is technically solvable, even just with the tech we have now, but the solutions aren’t practical and simple enough for it to happen now.
So I stay quite confident in my idea that as long as the government remains a little user friendly there will be cash when you and I die. And even if the government stops private citizens will find a way to keep cash alive at least in the black market. It solves too many problems too much better than the alternatives.
I just about use no cash right now. Almost everything is done by pushing around electrons. Of course, if I wanted to get cash and do it all that way, I could still do it, but that would be a lot more trouble for me. I would imagine there is a great number who are like me.
What’s going to happen is that there is going to be a “tipping point” and things will shift real fast at that tipping point. One can’t predict those kinds of things, as they just come out of the blue, but that’s how some things change and change really fast. I believe the change will come about as a “tipping point” issue and then it will happen virtually overnight.
But, all the talk about how long such a thing could be or will be before it happens reminds me of the child always asking, “Are we there yet?!”
It gets old after a while, because you know that we’re getting closer and closer to the destination - all while the question keeps coming up again and again.
AND THEN ... all of a sudden ... we reach the destination.