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This "cash-interest phenomenon" may sound trivial, but it's a link to a whole other revolution in finance: the dissolution of the government monopoly on money. After all, if some small bank in Luxembourg or Belize is willing to pay you more interest on your digital cash, who are you to argue? As long as the bank's digits are widely accepted, there is no need to stick with government-issued numbers. Government money will still exist, but so will dozens of other currencies, each tailored to a specific need and endlessly convertible and exchangeable. The best money, in short, will be the smartest money. Says Howard Greenspan, president of Toronto-based Heraclitus Corp., a management consulting firm: "In the electronic city, the final step in the evolution of money is being taken. Money is being demonetized. Money is being eliminated."
Maybe. Digital cash, for all its charms, is still climbing a tough road to acceptance. "Between 40% and 50% of transactions today use cash and checks," says Steve Cone, an executive at Fidelity Investments. "The percentage is going down, but slowly. It's like Chinese water torture." And there are plenty of folks who still like cold cash just fine. Says economist Bruce Skoorka: "Look, every day there's a guy who shows up at a bank in Bogota with a big box full of cash. You think he wants to travel with a traceable digital-cash card?"
In fact, in the eyes of some digital-cash Pollyannas, one of the great things about traceable, bit-based cash is that it will do away with whole categories of cash-based crime. "Paper money is, I hate to say it, the root of all evil," says DigiCash founder Chaum, who argues that the traceability of electronic cash will mean the end of some types of crime. "What kidnapper would take a ransom payment by check? Once you build the infrastructure for electronic cash, the incremental cost of replacing paper money is small. And the social benefits could be amazing."
But Chaum assumes that these electronic transactions will be traceable--something that's sort of a jump ball in the theory of electronic finance these days. One school of theorists, led by Chaum, argues that electronic cash needs to be "one-way anonymous" so that people transferring money can always see where it goes, while people receiving money won't know where it comes from. This one-way-mirror transfer solves some of the problems of paper money, since it makes it easier to keep track of where money is spent and why. But who really wants to leave "money tracks" wherever he goes?
Electronic cash can also be two-way anonymous--totally untraceable and a dream for international criminals. Even old-style tax cheats would be entranced by an anonymity that would allow them to earn income without forking over a chunk to Uncle Sam. And that means rejiggering the IRS--and quickly. "Digital cash has no boundaries," explains Richard Rahn, president of Novecon Ltd., a technology consulting firm. "The cybermoney revolution makes some forms of tax evasion very easy." And these innovations even call into question the role of the Federal Reserve as arbiter of the nation's money supply. "The more such innovations succeed, the less the public has to rely on central banks as direct sources of exchange media," University of Georgia economics professor George Selgin has written, "This seems to me to be particularly obvious in the case of E-money."