Learn about the causes that are causing the progressive disappearance of cash.
Blockchain further opens the door to a possibility that millions of users and many regulators are cherishing: reducing cash to a handful of very small coins and notes. For everything else, the smartphone.
Cash has begun to disappear and shrink drastically in northern European countries to the point that rumors are going to have to end up giving beggars a smartphone to collect alms. This situation will spread, to very different degrees, to most developed states and to emerging states that are not among the poorest.
The cause of this progressive disappearance of money is manifold. To begin with, millions of users prefer to pay with their mobile phones and more than half of transactions – in total value – in many countries are carried out with account notes and not with coins and banknotes. Secondly, there is already a new secure software called blockchain that helps to create electronic wallets, to make micro-transfers cheaper (we can now pay for coffee with the phone) and to balance the balance sheets of financial institutions more easily. Third, states, which substantially increased their debts during the crisis, believe that the electronic trail left by the new money will come in handy for them to pursue the underground economy and to collect more taxes if necessary.
The change has already begun. It is true that we are paying more and more with our mobile phones, that fewer and fewer businesses do not accept mobile payments – or by card – of between five and ten euros and that large banks are designing complex computer systems to better balance their balance sheets with blockchain and even create their own wallets and digital currencies. In the medium term,
