As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over. The majority of us already kept all our wealth in digital form. I continued to use 100% cash day to day many years after all my colleagues had switched to contactless (only switched when I got Monzo around 2017/2018). But I wasn't walking around with a wad of cash and I didn't keep my salary in a vault at home. It was in a current account and I took out at the very most £100 at a time. If someone had shut down all my non-cash payment mechanisms and froze my account I'd still only have enough money for a week.
I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.
The thing is, even if you don't save and hold lots of physical cash to maintain your needs, if you ever did get your digital money turned off, you could still work with your employer or friends to get cash and buy things.
In a cashless society, that option is completely off the table, and you will be forced to rely on the goodwill of others to buy things for you, and hope they don't also get turned off by sin of aiding you.
> As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over.
That's not what the term cashless society is usually used to convey though. If you really wanted, you could've been operating largely cashless ever since credit cards became widely accepted (1970s?). But even today (at least in the USA) you can still withdraw your whole paycheck in cash and pay everything that way, if you wanted to. So we're fortunately not a cashless society at all.
I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.