Notes and coins are disappearing from daily life as cards and phones take over payment. I believe this shift is a positive development, provided cash is not eliminated entirely.
The first benefit is convenience married to security. Digital payment removes the need to carry, count and guard physical money: a stolen wallet once meant losses gone forever, whereas a stolen card can be frozen in seconds. Shops close their tills faster, queues shorten, and transactions leave records that make budgeting and refunds simple. Sweden, the world’s most advanced cashless economy, has seen cash-related robberies of banks and shops fall to almost nothing — a security dividend enjoyed by workers as much as owners.
The second and larger gain is transparency. Cash is the natural medium of tax evasion, bribery and money laundering precisely because it leaves no trace; electronic payments create an audit trail that makes such activity far harder to hide. Governments recover revenue that once vanished into informal channels, and citizens gain access to the formal financial system — a phone-based account is often the first step by which the previously unbanked begin saving, borrowing and building businesses, as mobile-money systems across Africa have demonstrated. It is true that a cashless society risks excluding the elderly and hands corporations and states a detailed map of private life, and these concerns are legitimate. But they argue for keeping cash alive alongside digital payment and for strong privacy law, not for halting the transition.
In conclusion, the move away from cash brings speed, safety, cleaner public finances and wider financial inclusion, while its risks can be managed by preserving cash as an option. On balance, this is clearly a positive development.