After Cash: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses a Bank Account
The biggest problem I see coming with &quot;cashless societies&quot; is severe technological fragmentation. For mobile payments, in China you can get around with WeChat Pay and AliPay; in USA you use PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, and probably a few others I&#x27;m forgetting. In Australia you have PayWave. What about plastic? In Singapore you have NETS, in USA you have Amex, Visa, MasterCard, in China you have UnionPay, ...<p>And guess what? None of these systems talk to each other. Even PayPal USA doesn&#x27;t talk to PayPal China for goodness sake. Most payment systems require local addresses and phone numbers to even register an account, so if you&#x27;re a short-term tourist or business traveller, you&#x27;re out of luck. If you&#x27;re a frequent international traveller, cashless societies are going to be absolute hell unless we come up with some kind of internationally-standardized protocol, which doesn&#x27;t seem to be happening any time soon because each payment system has a corporate agenda behind it.