Two days ago, during the Fortune’s Brainstorm Finance conference, Bank of America stated that it wanted a “cashless” society, in other words, one that never uses cash to make payments.
While this can mean less tax evasion, having a cashless society would also mean that every single transaction would have to go through an institution or a third party, be it a bank, PayPal, or other giants in the payment industry.
This not only means higher fees but also that the third party involved can control, supervise and monitor all transactions.
In addition, in a cashless society people who do not have valid identity documents or who come from Third World countries that do not have the opportunity to open a bank account, would find it more difficult to pay or be paid if nobody were to accept cash or no longer had it in their pockets.
And that’s where bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general, could come into play. It is clear that cash is becoming disused, but what could the future be? A world in which all transactions are handed over to a central authority or a world in which more and more payments are made with cryptocurrencies in order to protect one’s privacy and autonomy?
To go into more detail, we recommend an interesting interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos:
