Cashless future ahead? Utopian digital dream with dystopian inequality

In China's largest cities, over 90% of people use WeChat Pay and Alipay as their primary payment method, with cash a distant second.

A cashless society may also discriminate against the poor, as Vlad Totia, a payments analyst at analytics and consulting firm GlobalData, told Cointelegraph: "A digital society requires people to at least have access to a device and an internet connection in order to manage their personal finances." But many in the U.S. and other countries still don't have this access, so eliminating cash risks further disenfranchising society's least-well-off members - exacerbating income inequality.

There may be psychological barriers, too, Holden noted: "People have been using cash for a long time, and it has required a mindset shift to move fully away from cash. But many young people literally cannot imagine a world pre-iPhone."

Digital payment schemes could curtail tax evasion and reduce illegal transactions that often take place using cash.

Holden noted: "Cash is clumsy in many ways: it is slow during transactions, and handling cash is time-consuming and involves costly insurance for businesses."

"Lockdowns, temporary closure of businesses, people not going out of their homes, ordering groceries at home. All of these aspects have pushed people into using online banking and payment methods more because quite simply you can't use cash much in these times."

Prabhakar told Cointelegraph that digital payments are intrinsically more secure than cash, which can be lost and forged - and recovery is almost impossible: "Most digital transactions offer various levels of security and repudiability, e.g. the ability to dispute a credit card charge, which cash cannot compete with.

According to Totia: "Cashless, mobile or QR code payments are a lot faster than paying by cash.

Hedman's study of 750 Swedish retailers found that when cash transactions are less than 7% of the total payment transactions, the cost to manage cash is higher than any profit made on cash sales.

" Prabhakar worries that a cashless society might exacerbate income inequality, hurting socioeconomically disadvantaged minorities, workers in service industries - who are often paid in cash - and others who "have neither the access to the banking system nor the technology tools to fully participate in a cashless economy.