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I am not an economist, but in this world of negative interest-rates (now common in Europe), another reason for cashless is to prevent people from keeping cash at home, behavior that make sense when the bank is making you pay for having a positive account.

And as a cryptocurrency enthusiast, this cashless trend is also a way to make it harder to hide your crypto assets: hand-to-hand exchange of cash against crypto is indeed one of the best anonymization way.

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It's basically a way to make bank runs illegal.

You have to pull out cash from the bank for a bank run to occur. Can't you buy gold or some other cash substitute instead?

Could be even more difficult to detect than abnormal spike in cash withdrawals via ATMs.

Spending money is taking money out of your bank account. Any event where more money leaves a bank than they have reserves to cover it is a run on the bank. I think what you may be elluding to is that digital transfer of funds makes the effects of a bank run different than than when cash is involved, since real money in hand cash is much more limited than a bank’s total reserves.

How?

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