Japan has tap payments for public transit and restaurants for decades, while simultaneously being very cash driven. Will be interesting to see how the cash meta evolves with different countries and cultures.
This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.
They started by generating outrage about fare evaders (the previous system was an "honor" based proof of payment, at least for the train). They claimed to be losing ~3 million $CAD yearly to fare evasion.
Then they made a plan to retrofit all the train stations with fare gates, and get new machines for the buses. The cost of this work was ~100 million $CAD.
I thought, well that will take some time to amortize. Then I learned that the maintenance cost of all this extra crap in the stations was on the order of $3 million/year. Clearly it was never about fare evasion.
You can buy a card with cash, and charge it with cash at machines in the stations, but there are strong incentives to link your account with a credit card.
The truth was confirmed several years later when I read an article in a local paper quoting someone at Translink who said their policy is to share trip data with police on request, without a warrant.
And you assume the previous system cost $0 annually for maintenance?
If they really did it to stop fare evasion, it was ideological, not pragmatic. They spent pounds to save pennies.
Mass surveillance, on the other hand, is a motivation that makes sense, just not something you can really sell to the public when looking to spend a hundred million of taxpayer money.
On the other other hand, the kind of government that attempts to stamp out petty crime, at any cost, is the same sort of government that tends to want to surveil everyone.
They were teeing up introducing a "road pricing" scheme that would have also happened to record every vehicle trip on the local highways when their government was defeated.
The main gaps that were filled:
- interpersonal payment is now easy. 10 people eat together, splitting the bill is now sharing a QR code and 30s of operation for each, no exchange of contact, nothing finicky, and it can also be done later (no tap needed)
- phone networks are fast enough to make the transactions near instaneous. We're talking 3s at most in a sheet mobile environment. 1s with a wired POS.
- phone are secure enough, being already the central part of our electronic life.
All in all, cash will always be used somewhere, but even grandma's vegetable stands are starting to accept QR codes.
I live in Canada, and honestly, nobody in any of my circles carry cash. The only use cases I can think of ate casinos and drugs. All the comments about “privacy, freedom and etc.” sounds like noise, and highly unlikely for younger people to even care about.