I think the commenters so far are missing the point. This isn't a money-less society, but a cashless society. The money is based on American dollars, but soon they expect no hard cash to be changing hands.
I don't mind the idea of cashless society, as long as there is some way to allow for anonymous purchases.
I do mind the idea of a cashless society because then there will be no way for anonymous purchases. It's like saying: "I don't mind being set on fire just so long as they make provision that I won't get too hot. Uhhh.. yeah. We'll get right on that.
"I don't mind being set on fire just so long as they make provision that I won't get too hot"
It's called a fire suit. And one could certainly devise a method to allow for anonymous digital transactions via public-private key cryptography and Tor-like network routing.
One possible implementation would require a central transaction entity (CTE). The buyer's bank would send the digital money and a one-time public key to the CTE via a TOR-like network. The CTE would then reply with a unique identifier (encrypted using that public key), to be relayed to the buyer (some personal device). This unique identifier is what would then be encrypted with the seller's public key. The seller's bank would then receive the money from the CTE by using that same unique identifier.
What does this mean?
1. The buyer's bank does not know where it sent the money.
2. The CTE knows only that a transaction occurred between two banks.
3. The seller's bank does not know where it received the money from.
Obviously there are additional difficulties in trying to add ambiguity to the dollar amounts, but in principal a process like this could work.
This article would have been vastly improved by actually describing how the system works for cashless purchases of goods and services. I can sort of guess but it would be interesting to actually know...
I don't mind the idea of cashless society, as long as there is some way to allow for anonymous purchases.