David is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of “The End of Money”
When I first embarked on the journey that became The End of Money, I wanted to personalize this investigation into the past and future of cash. So I decided to go a year without ever using notes or coins.
Turns out, a year without cash wasn’t too difficult. There were some hang-ups, sure, like trying to hop a train from New Jersey into Manhattan one day, and a few awkward moments staring over restaurant bills with friends. For the most part, though, life just carried on. The year without cash turned out to be less of a plot line and more like a mirror, allowing me to reflect on how cashless my life has already become, while zeroing in on the corners of the economy where cash has really dug in its heels.
In this way, and in many others, my research and writing were an education. I learned so much from people throughout the world, all of whom are curious, if not obsessed, about many of the same questions that have been eating at me:
- What is money?
- What are the costs of cash and who pays for them?
- Why do we treat different forms of money differently?
- What is all this talk about alternative currencies, how do we reduce friction in our financial lives, and how can we develop new technologies to promote financial inclusion and, ultimately, prosperity?
Searching for the people and technologies that illuminate the road ahead, I traveled from a metalwork shop in Hawaii to Iceland’s central bank, from the Digital Money Forum in London to the slums of Delhi, from rural Georgia to a skyscraper in Tokyo. And now I’m getting ready for a trip to MasterCard in Purchase, New York to participate in their Cashless Conversation. It’s fitting, I suppose: you can’t really have an intelligent conversation about money and the future without talking about credit, debit and prepaid cards, the network technology underlying them, and the companies that have made them so pervasive.
I’m looking forward to the chance to meet and talk with people who have been thinking about some of these same issues for far longer than I have, and to share some of my observations.