A Cashless Society is NOT a Bad Thing For Liberty

The Idea that electronic money inherently gives government/banks some power they don't already have, is false and is built on false logic. You should not fear the elimination of paper money (which is an idea), you should fear the issuer of paper money, governments. A paper currency issued by a government is still inferior in its support of liberty to an electronic currency issued through a decentralized method, like Bitcoin or Monero. 

The arguments against electronic money are largely based on a false understanding of the obvious limitations of government issued paper money, and to a lesser degree on religious superstitions, often from man-made religions. Yes, the people who make up religions think you should work and they should print money to best allocate the fruits of your labor. If you want to allocate the fruits of your own labor, they are going to be pissed.

Money is Just a Tool for the Exchange of Value

Electronic money is a highly misunderstood concept like the concept of money itself. If I asked the reader "what is money?" most of you would not have a good answer. If you have a previously-thought-of one sentence answer to that question I say good for you. If your answer was "what you buy things with," I am not talking to you and you should have said "I don't know." One correct answer to the question of what money is: A tool for the exchange of value. 

Money is a tool, like a hammer, or more appropriately like the internet. The internet lets you exchange information with people a lot of ways: email; Twitter; Minds; Discord. Money is a tool that lets you exchange VALUE. 

Imagine sending money as easily as a tweet, or setting up a little trivia game where your first friend to answer your question got $5 sent to them.Your money has not had a tech innovation in over 60 years (way longer if you don't count credit cards and wires), that is why it seems like it is something other than a tool. It is not a tool designed optimally for you, it is primarily a tool someone else (the banking elite) uses to control what you do. That is the reason information has gone from a hand-written letter to a discord server and no major comparable tech upgrade has come to your money.

If you did not have an answer ready for my question "what is money," (considering I gave the answer in the title) I suggest you read on with a very open mind.

India Proved Cash Can't Protect You From The Government That Issued It

Imagine you have a gift card from McDonalds. Who has control over the value of that gift card? McDonalds can 1) set an expiration date 2) close shop and not honor the card (unlikely) 3) and most importantly of all, McDonalds can set the food prices. McDonalds has 90% of the power involved with that gift card because they are the issuer and ultimately the entity that will provide actual value for the card (a BigMac). The reason McDonalds only has 90% control is because they are not a government. If they flat out dishonor the card without going out of business and before the expiration date, they will have legal consequences. A government enjoys no such form of accountability because no one sits above them. They can dilute your value by flooding the economy with money (Venezuela/Weimar Germany), they can enact exorbitant taxes, they can even seize money from people they don't like.

If you believe that holding cash will protect you from the government that issues the currency, you should consider what happened in India in 2016. The government invalidated a large portion of the cash to force the black market operators to come in and switch out their old cash for new cash so they could be taxed. Like McDonalds in the example above, the Indian government had total control over the cash, because they are the issuing entity. If their banks won't accept it, it becomes worthless. 

Comparing Solid Crypto to Cash is like Comparing a Supercomputer to a Rolodex

The arguments against electronic money indirectly mimic to the arguments that the education system made for 3 decades against computers. I will not address here the psychological arguments about the superiority of pen and paper and handwriting over a screen that blinks bright lights at your eyes/brain, but what made the computer the solution to the problems of education was the fact that it eventually became much cheaper than the item it needed to replace, the textbook. All the people who said "computers can't solve the problem with education for poor people" were right up until the computers did just that. Now a $35 computer with a Gig of memory replaces $10,000 worth of heavy textbooks. What the computer does, is it allows anyone who knows the subject matter to transmit that knowledge to everyone else, like an instant free printing press of millions. 

Bitcoin, the most primitive of the cryptos, makes every cell phone not a Swiss Bank account, but an actual Swiss bank. With Ethereum, it is possible for a robot to hold cryptocurrencies and distribute them according to a program. Right now, there are not only crypto currencies that cannot be traced (Monero/Dash), but protocols for invisible smart contracts like Enigma where the robots holding crypto are completely invisible. 

Electronic Money, Like the Electronic Textbook, Removes the Cost of Issuing a Currency so almost Anyone Can do it.

A text book and government cash both require a giant industrial printing press, a distribution system, and numerous individual laborers. An electronic currency, like an electronic text book, requires 2 persons and a computer for each of them. With the advent of electronic money, there are now over 2000 cryptocurrencies. From the perspective of an investor, most of these currencies, like the fiat currencies of the world, will go to zero but not all of them. Cryptocurrency is like the lightbulb, once you have seen it work, you can't go back to the oil lamp no matter how bad the oil lamp salesman wants you to.

Government Money is not Inherently Superior to People's Money

Most of you know this but it is worth saying. Why would you be more likely to accept a government's fiat currency than one similar to bitcoin? Government offers a stability of sorts. Bitcoin has gone from $.008 to $20,000 to $3500 today. That is clearly unstable (overall a dollar at the beginning became $7,000,000). While the U.S. Dollar is has only lost 99% of its value since 1913, look at other government currencies like the Ruble, the Yen, and the Venezuelan Bolivar. Bitcoin was designed with a finite supply of tokens, so when more value is added to the system, the value goes into the existing tokens, not into new ones printed by a controller for the controller. Finite money supply for a finite planet, imagine that. There is no way to counterfeit or hack Bitcoin (though someone may do it with a quantum computer). The fraud department for crypto at Overstock.com is one underworked person, the credit card fraud department is over 20 people. 

A Narrow-minded Fear of Cashless Society Diverts Attention Away From the True Enemy of Liberty

The true enemy of liberty is a person or group who wants to use violence or the threat thereof to control others. Of these groups, governments are by far the worst offenders. It is the height of foolishness to believe that a flimsy piece of paper issued by the enemies of liberty is going to protect liberty from the enemies of liberty. Anonymity protects liberty, and there are cryptos that offer anonymity. 

But what truly protects liberty is understanding who the enemies of liberty are and having the determination not to cooperate with them. I am not talking about pitchforks and torches, I am talking about choosing not to let them profit from the value you create or to let them make you believe, in your heart, that you need them. Everything a government has ever done for you, there is a way for you to do yourself. You, however, are indispensable to a government: it must  value creators to tax for its survival. 

Yes, a cashless U.S. banking system would give them the ability to steal your money right out of your bank account and see everything you do, but that is a reflection of who they are even with paper money. If you want to keep playing in their sandbox over an issue as small as the fact that they offer a paper option, well, that is a reflection of who you are. You should put your buying power into the vehicle that gives you the most control and tyrants who would control you the least.