If the endgame is to ban cash, what would be the back up plan for in case of war, solar flare* or other natural disaster?
*electromagnetic pulse destroy electronic devices (no ATMs, card readers)
*electromagnetic pulse destroy electronic devices (no ATMs, card readers)
Does it need to be a natural disaster? Things like a widespread network failure, a major bank's systems going down for a while (happened not so long ago here), or even a country-wide blackout (we had one last week, triggered by a fault in a fault detection system mistakenly powering down a high-voltage transmission line, and for some yet to be determined reason that led to an instability which triggered other fault detection systems) can be a pain if you depend on an online system.
The cities will be awful places with death, destruction, and lawlessness.
Even assuming things like tractors etc. still work see how much yield local farmer will get once he can't get their fertilizers and pesticides shipped.
"harsh" is understatement, we're talking hundreds of millions dying from hunger within a year or two.
The Carrington Event is the "most recent" in 1859 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
That would in the 2000s cause serious damage
>In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion (equivalent to $698 billion to $3.02 trillion in 2021[28]),[3] which, at the time, equated to roughly 3.6 to 15.5 per cent of annual GDP.
NOAA currently puts Carrington Events at a 1 in 500 year occurrence on Earth.