Third, if anything, a cashless society would be a much bigger problem for the public than for any central bank. According to cybersecurity experts, if cash were to disappear, "governments and banks could leverage greater control of the economy" and be in the position to impose a surveillance state.
The Twilight Zone example
Campbell's piece begins with a misremembered episode from a popular television series, The Twilight Zone, The Rip Van Winkle Caper (1961).
"In an old Twilight Zone episode, a bank robber stashes stolen cash and has himself cryogenically frozen. A hundred years later, waking up as programmed, his crime long forgotten, he digs up his stash and tries to spend it. No one will take it.
Exasperated, he heads to a bank and brazenly tries to deposit a wad of bills. “What’s this?” a perplexed teller asks. “It’s cash!” says the somewhat impatient bank robber. “Cash?" says the teller. “That hasn’t been used for decades. Sorry, it’s worthless."
That cashless day is upon us. We didn’t have to be frozen to find that out – just frightened.
In the actual episode, four bank robbers stash stolen gold bricks (not cash) to take with them into the future. Whether or not they would have been able to trade the gold at a bank is never addressed, since none of them make it out of the desert and into town. Only one robber makes contact with civilization when a couple driving along the road find him breathing his last breaths. Immediately, he tries to offer his last bar of gold in exchange for water and a trip to town, but before they can respond, the robber dies from exhaustion. After checking his vitals, and declaring him (not cash) as dead, the couple drive off. One of them wonders why he was trading with gold when it has been manufactured artificially for a century, and the other answers that "it was once used as money". And yet, the form that money takes in this fictitious future, be it, cash, social credit, cryptocurrency, something new or a mixture, is never revealed.
