I was involved in the first push to go cashless back around 1994. The original idea was called Mondex.
Basically you would carry around an electronic wallet that carried your cash equivalent. There were various ways of topping up this wallet, from plugging it into an ATM to having a home swipe machine.
The Idea didn't really take off because why would you carry an electronic wallet full of money when a wallet full of cash does the same thing?
I was also involved in the next step after Mondex: telephone banking. I write the application for one of the big 4 banks. It's still essentially the same application today, albeit with bolt-ons.
But the push to cashless has been a thing since having weekly cash pay packets stopped being a thing. Why have cash if you get electronic tokens into your account for your wages and you spend electronic tokens in the shop? Because Banks. Banks don't like cash. It is labour intensive, as anyone trying to extract cash from a bank recently has found out.
But even the original cashless projects have now been superseded by the smartphone application.
It wasn't until improvements in internet availability and online services really took off that the idea of a cashless society really took off. The convenience of cashless has moved on leaps and bounds. Your smartphone now works like a card, making payments.
You can also manage your account, make payments all on your phone.
But the technology requires several external factors to be available and work for the cashless system to work.
You need electricity, fundamentally, in order for the point of sale systems to work. Cash can work without tills.
If you have electricity you also need the POS system to have network connectivity and on from that access to the internet.
And that's just the user end. Then you have all the back end infrastructure and processing necessary to process payments and keep track of your account.
Cash works without any of that. It can be exchanged during power cuts, on bomb sites, outside internet access, away from wireless phone signals. And there still are places without any of that.
Cash needs to stay. Otherwise, yet again portions of the population will be disenfranchised.
Instead of an inclusive monetary system, where all can participate without prejudice, going cashless moves us to a permissive monetary system, where the system has provide special access for people that don't have all the facilities required to participate.
Someone needs to provide something to people that allows access to money without internet, without power and without access to the internet.
Of course cash does that already.
And this is where we get into tinfoil hat territory. Because if cash works fine already and allows a small portion of society access to money regardless of technology, why of why are the Banks trying to get rid of it?
Hopefully, there will be some way to get cash and spend it even when the majority of people are cashless, because it's still very much required by some parts of society.
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