Cash is already dead. Consider that most of the spending, receiving, and storing you currently do is electronic. Very little is transacted in cash anymore. The choice is not whether your future money will be electronic, it's about which money you will use.
As much as I like technology and electronic cash, bitcoin included, I think there's still a place for fiat cash.
- Children learning to save by taking physical coins and putting them in a piggy bank.
- People who just needs a way to pay, and forever reason cannot or willnot use electronical gadgets.
- EMP-attacks. What now - nobody has the means to pay for anything? If a country goes all electronic cash, what if a foreign country decides to EMP-blast the entire country - nobody can access their electronic devices anymore. Havoc withour war?
- Relying on you phone to make a payment is bad, as the phone can be stolen, it can be lost, it can be broken, or it can be decharged.
- Relying on having a network connection to make payments is bad, as when the network goes down, there's sometimes no way to pay.
I've experienced cases when electricity and network goes out, and it's not pretty. People are close to paralyzed as to what to do. Of course you can have backup solutions for electricity and network, but everyone will not have that. Also, in the event of the large scale EMP-attack, even the backup-solutions (unless protected properly), will be blown out. As long as you have fiat cash and street vendors accept it, you can get your eggs and breads.
And believe it or not, in some remote places, road tax is paid, simply by drivers putting coins into a metal box with a slot. The metal box has no power requirements, hardly no maintenance requirements, and needs to electronic equipment to function.
And not to mention those people who really are technologically challenged. Give them a fiat note, and they understand what they're looking at, but once you need to give them a smart phone, with all the added bells and whistles, not only will they have a hard time understanding how to use it, to protect themselves, but the funds can even vanish while they sleep by someone hacking them remotely. Of course there's potential for them to learn and evolve, but everybody is not interested in that. Some people are only interested in going to work, have their pay, then buy groceries locally and that's it.
Also cash brings a sense of security, maybe you will never use it, but as long as you have 1000 dollars in cash available, you know that in the event of some crisis, you will manage for a little while. If the power goes out for a couple of days, you can still buy stuff, whereas if no cards and mobile phones can be used, those people are out of luck.
An added security feature is that nobody can remotely confiscate your cash, police officers in the US confiscating cash on the highways from random drivers is another story.. But if you have 1000 dollars on your pocket, that's what you have, and even if you use 100 of them in some suspicious shop, the remaining 900 will not be frozen "pending investigation".
You could argue that you should control your coins yourself, but many people are lazy and keep them with centralized services, and then we're not much further than using traditional banks.
As much as electronic money is great, there's 7 billion people on earth, everyone with their unique spending patterns and use cases. Many people are not even aware the internet exists.. For many many years to come, there will still be communities were network access is not the norm, and I don't see abolishment of cash as the ideal, but it playing a smaller role in the world economy is much more realistic.
I also see some politicians and electronic cash advocates claim that tracking all purchases will prevent money laundering, prevent terrorist financing and in short create the perfect society.
This will never happen. Criminals will always find a way, no matter what, and to kill that argument completely, look at the large financial institutions of our time. With the strict regulations they've still been able to participate largely in criminal schemes. This will not change.
I think we're seeing a shift towards larger usage of electronic money, but physical cash still has it's place. It need not be fiat money, it could be "paper wallets", but then the trouble would be to verify the value of the bills, as funds could already be swiped when the bill is delivered..
There's also the element of control, would not any government just love to control everything the citizens do? Now they could make elaborate advanced systems to track everything. Isn't it great, from the government point of view?
Bitcoin is great in the way that it circumvents all the artificial barriers that the established system has raised.
