> Banknotes are useful. Not only do they provide their owner with a standard set of payments services, they also offer financial anonymity.

> The product is weaponized and turned against its provider. This same sort of weaponization characterizes the modern provision of banknotes. The government, like Walmart, provides citizens with a privacy-enhancing product: cash.

This article has a strange fixation on the anonymous aspect of cash. It's almost suggesting that it's morally wrong to use cash (though we seem to tolerate it in society), and that non-anonymous alternatives that are tracked are better.

Let me give several arguments for why cash is beneficial even if you ignore anonymity:

0) Payments are final. Once you handed over cash, it cannot be taken back - unlike cheques and electronic money transfers, where you can claim "it was fraud" and ask the bank to reverse the payment. This gives the receiver a fairly strong guarantee of payment (except for counterfeit cash).

1) Payments are limited. Once you paid the cash and walk away, the receiver cannot take more money out of your wallet. This is unlike cheques and credit cards, where the receiver could use the account numbers to charge you more money anytime later.

2) No censorship. Look at the categories of goods and services that Visa and Mastercard ban. You might not agree with all of them. You might not be happy about future changes in rules.

3) No tolling. For the privilege of spending money on a credit card, the credit card company charges ~2% to the merchant, who in turn raises prices on the goods that you buy. Other payment methods like cheques, debit, bank transfers, wire transfers, etc. have other fee structures (generally much less than credit cards), but the fact that these payments are intermediated by financial companies means that they could charge arbitrary fees to you for transferring your money.

Here's another one:

4) It's offline, and works in the absence of electric power. Even if you're in a tiny village deep in the middle of the Amazon forest, you can still pay for things with cash.

Some other nice things about cash:

- It's useful with children. A concrete representation of value is tangible compared to an abstract number in a bank account.

- It's great for gifts

- It's harder to refuse: I've had a restaurant make a mistake and then refuse to charge me. I left cash on the table when I left.

> It's almost suggesting that it's morally wrong to use cash

Quite the opposite actually, it emphasizes the importance of such anonymity but also acknowledges that it also comes with problems for society.

> 0) Payments are final. Once you handed over cash, it cannot be taken back

First this isn't true, as most good comes with legal guarantee, retraction rights and so on. And then the near-final aspect of cash is also the reason why armed robberies works. (And yes I said near final, because the police routinely seize cash from people who got it illegally).

> 3) No tolling.

Cash is extremely expensive to handle for banks, and even if they don't charge you directly, they definitely factor this cost in what they charge to all their customers (business and individuals alike).

Would you say that most of the benefits you attribute to cash can only be realized electronically using cryptocurrencies?