Farewell to cash?
Recent news suggests that we may be moving inexorably toward a cash-free society. Governments such as Denmark’s, which has just announced that it will stop printing money and minting coins from 2017 onward in a bid to save resources, a move that the UK is following closely on the basis that having less cash in the system makes it easier to deal with recession or financial crises. A society where people have to pay electronically is pretty much any government’s wet dream, given that it is more or less impossible to evade tax or launder money.
Anybody who travels frequently will probably have noticed that they no longer change as much money at the airport as they used to. In the United States, people are using cash less and less as they become used to paying with credit cards, and smartphone services such as Apple Pay or Google Wallet, or Uber and Starbucks’ apps (the latter already processes some seven million transactions a week).
In fact, the only reason I have bothered to withdraw cash from an ATM during my short stay here in the United States has been to tip holtel staff. Everything else, from meals to the tiniest souvenir, has been paid for electronically. During a recent two-day trip to London, I used no cash at all. Needless to say, in one’s own country, the use of cash is on the decline: weeks can go by without me having to withdraw money from an ATM, despite moving around and buying things all the time.
In which case, are we headed toward a cash-free society? It certainly seems like it. We call an Uber taxi and head out to do some shopping with just our smartphone, when we get where we’re going we receive an email and evaluate our driver, and then pay for our shopping by smartphone after identifying ourselves with a digital thumbprint, and then relax with cup of coffee paid for with an app.
Which isn’t to say things can’t go wrong. Recently, a group of criminals hacked into the accounts of Starbucks customers with weak passwords to access consumers’ linked credit cards. Taking advantage of the Starbucks auto-reload function, they stole hundreds of dollars in a matter of minutes. The company responded by telling customers to be more careful about their passwords.
The main problem with a cash-free society is, once again, lack of privacy. For many people still like to buy things without anybody necessarily knowing, for whatever reason, whether they are chocolate flavored condoms or a service of a specialist and intimate nature. Which means that if we are all going to be able to enjoy purchasing things without the hassle of cash we’re going to need to find matching technologies that allow us to buy things without there being any record of it, if we so wish. This could be through bitcoins, and specifically blockchain, and which some are saying will change the world, and is already being tried out on the NASDAQ.
It’s clear where we are headed. Whichever systems are finally produced may lean in favor of one technology or another: it’s simply a question of what developments take place and how technologies that are already here are adopted. So we might as well start getting our heads round the idea of the cash-free society. Or maybe you already have.
(En español, aquí)
