IT’S an old musicians’ (or freelancers’) trick. In your lush days, you draw a roll of cash from an ATM, bind it with elastic, then stick it in the inside pocket of a beloved but rarely worn jacket. Then when you gotta get out of Dodge (or sometimes, need a deposit to get in), you have the irreducible means. Or at least a starting point.

I checked on my roll only a few weeks ago. In my current life of incessant smartphone tapping on cash points, I held it to the light like a rare fossil. A story this week has returned me to it: on September 30, they’re withdrawing paper-based £20 & £50 notes, Scottish and British, from circulation (their plastic — in fact, polymer—replacements are already in full circulation).

I ping off the elastic, and there are indeed a few well-weathered twenties and fifties in there. One has hieroglyphic felt-tip on it; all need their wipe-clean (and hard to counterfeit) successors. But despite the growing digital norm, I won’t bank the money, and I will replace the roll. You never know.

My anxieties are one thing. But I’m discovering that there’s a whole politics around “cash” money being superseded by “cashless” money.

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My timing may not be great here. This is a moment when it looks like there will be mass non-payment of bills, as a result of unbearable cost of living rises. The way we use and access money may seem entirely secondary to our sheer need for it.

Yet the debate is worth having, right now – particularly if our pile-up of “polycrises” means we have to enact fundamental economic and social reforms. If there’s something wrong with the way we use money, we should fix that too.

According to the brilliant work of the former trader and now financial hacker Brett Scott, we’ve been steered towards a cashless economy by corporate and state interests for over a decade now.

Their incentive is obvious. There’s a whole range of intermediaries (Visa, Mastercard and others) who take their cut from your digital transactions. And every time you make a cashless payment, all your juicy behaviour patterns go somewhere – into some organisation’s marketing database.

Finally, in a world where malefactors like Vladimir Putin’s Russia need to be financially isolated, the more digital flows that can be halted by state and regulatory action, it is claimed, the better.

Scott pushes back to defend cash money on each of these points. Cash is physical, exchanged between real people in actual communities. Your transactions with it are not susceptible to all the slicing and skimming that goes on with digital exchanges. It’s also closer to what money ultimately and reliably is – a unit of value guaranteed by your national bank.

Secondly, cash money belongs to you (my roll in my inside pocket). And you can use it, anonymously, as you wish, for what you wish.

In his new book Cloudmoney, Scott goes into great detail about how digital money is actually a secondary token produced by your bank, backed up by guarantees from the state. His metaphor is that it’s like converting your money into casino chips – which then encourages you to keep playing with those chips under their rules, in their house.

This leads to the third point – that cash money doesn’t open its user up to the possibility of permanent and total surveillance by dominant forces the way digital cash does.

Scott suggests this scenario. You’re a human rights organisation, mobilising against the constrictions and privations of the current Tory government. Given the current recklessness of Brexiteer politicians, should you risk trying to raise money digitally, if it meant identities and clusters of activists could be potentially discerned, by an out-of-control Secretary of State? Should you go back to street buckets and benefit concerts?

YOU may be recoiling at the level of distrust in our systems of power and money this view indicates. Indeed, Scott says that his defence of cash money, as a still-viable alternative in a reasonable open society, is often hijacked by the frothier conspiracy theorists.

A colleague sent me some anonymous flyers they’d spotted the other day. “Cash is freedom, use it or lose it!” goes the slogan at the top. They had an intermittently justified set of fears – “NO saving for a rainy day, NO selling unwanted items for cash, NO tipping waiters or hairdressers, NO car boot sales or markets, NO fivers for the grandchildren, NO coins for the homeless or buskers, NO tooth fairy or piggy banks, NO financial privacy and much more”. And all of them based on “government plans to introduce programmable digital currency”.

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Do such plans exist? Well, yes. Among many other countries, The Bank of England is considering a CBDC – a central bank digital currency. It’s for all the usual reasons: convenience, efficiency, competitiveness. The conspiracists flag up the powers over everyday finances this shift would enact. But like all conspiracists, they carefully select and distort their evidence.

Yes, Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s Emergency Act allowed the digital freezing of accounts that supported the Freedom Convoys last year. But no, the Australian state wasn’t freezing the accounts of those who wouldn’t get vaccinated – that’s sheer fiction (they were actually pursuing fines for those caught breaking Covid laws on sneezing or non-mask-wearing).

Beyond the concerns of the swivel-eyed, the deeper question is how we maintain trust in any digital system these days, state or corporate, given their terrible recent records on surveillance and rent-seeking.

There’s still a lingering idealism around cryptocurrency, blockchains and their various “coins”. They once held out the potential of a realm of peer-to-peer financial operations, insulated from overweening powers. However, the range of scams they’ve perpetrated, the wild volatility in the value of these alternative currencies – not to mention their current courting of the establishment financial institutions they once opposed – has tarnished their ideal.

In arguments for an indy Scotland, of course, all of this is highly relevant. Do Estonia, Denmark and Finland give us models? Their high levels of social trust in public institutions seems to also support a level of state-directed digital finance. This allows for innovations that maximise the tax take, as well as business formation. Is that something Scottish independence could build on? If we are responsible for forging our own new digital institutions, might we then trust them more?

There are also some new ideas around that square some of Scott’s circles. Biden’s Congress is presently considering the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act (ECASH).

AS the think tank Autonomy writes, “like notes and coins, ECASH would be a ‘bearer’ instrument, with ownership validated by possession, rather than the verification of identity. This means that like physical cash, it requires no ID or account to use, allowing it to be used peer-to-peer without any intermediary to authorise the transaction (and therefore no fees), and without generating user data. The secured hardware means that it can even be used offline.” Something for indy’s central bank architects to consider.

Does this mean that I might replace my corny musician’s roll with a thumb drive? It’d be less romantic, for sure. But like the rest of you, right now, I’m just as anxious for the amount of my money, as the colour and shape of it.