Crime thrives on cash. It’s portable, secret, and everyone accepts it.

In every big drug bust, there is a wad of bills. In fact, carrying a lot of cash is usually a tipoff to authorities that something is untoward.

Illegal immigration depends on cash, too.

One economist proposes a ‘less cash’ society where big bills are no longer printed, leaving room for bills in denominations of $1 to $10. According to Kenneth S. Rogoff of Harvard University, this would still make it possible for ordinary people to buy their coffee while making it much harder for criminals to make huge transactions.

” A million dollars in $100 bills weighs approximately 22 pounds and can fit comfortably into a large shopping bag. With $10 bills, it isn’t so easy. Think of lugging around 220 pounds in a giant chest,” Rogoff writes in The Wall Street Journal.

There are places that are moving toward cash-less society, like Sweden. According to fastcoexist.com, Swedish unions have pushed for a more cashless society to prevent armed robberies of workers like bus drivers.

According to Niklas Arvidsson, a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, the most frequent users of cash are the older generations, and as they are aging, they are reducing their spending.

He notes that with less cash circulating, there’s a lessened potential of robbery, and the costs of business decrease as well because electronic transactions cost less to process than cash transactions.

But, even with the positive aspects, there are concerns that there will be problems, particularly when it comes to potential corruption and issues in tracing transactions.
There’s another issue, as the BBC pointed out in a July 2015 article – people are very attached to their cash and coin. There’s been a backlash when people talk about getting rid of pennies, despite the costs of producing them.

All of these articles draw the same sort of conclusions: it will take time to move away from cash usage, and there are problems that would need to be sorted before that happens.