Cash
The word cash comes from the Middle French caisse 'money box', which comes from the Old Italian cassa, and ultimately from the Latin capsa 'box'.
In a separate development, Venetian merchants started using paper bills, instructing their banker to make payments.
The Byzantine Empire and several states in the Balkan area and Kievan Rus also used marked silver bars for large payments.
[4] During his visit to China in the 13th century, Marco Polo was amazed to find that people traded paper money for goods rather than valuable coins made of silver or gold.
Marco Polo also talks about the chance of forgery and states that someone caught forging money would be punished with death.
[5] In the 17th century, European countries started to use paper money in part due to a shortage of precious metals, leading to fewer coins being produced and put into circulation.
The relation between money supply and inflation was still imperfectly understood and the bank went under rendering its notes worthless, because they had been over-issued.
The lessons learned were applied to the Bank of England, which played a crucial role in financing the Peninsular War against French troops, hamstrung by a metallic Franc de Germinal.
Research has found that the demand for cash decreases as debit card usage increases because merchants need to make less change for customer purchases.
Analyzes show that private households are increasingly keeping cash as a precaution against crises and that negative interest rates also play a role.
[24] Cashless society can be defined as one in which all financial transactions are handled through "digital" forms (debit and credit cards) in preference to cash (physical banknotes and coins).
[25] Since the 1980s, the use of banknotes has increasingly been displaced by credit and debit cards, electronic money transfers and mobile payments, but much slower than expected.
The cashless society has been predicted for more than forty years,[26] but cash remains the most widely used payment instrument in the world and on all continents.
[28] In 2016, the United States User Consumer Survey Study reported that three out of four of the participants preferred a debit or credit card payment instead of cash.
[30] Cash is still the primary means of payment (and store of value) for unbanked people with a low income and helps avoiding debt traps due to uncontrolled spending of money.
[31] In addition, cash is the only means for contingency planning in order to mitigate risks in case of natural disasters or failures of the technical infrastructure like a large-scale power blackout or shutdown of the communication network.
[34] Digital currency is a generic term for various approaches to support secure transactions of the public or using a distributed ledger, like blockchain, as a new technology for decentralized asset management.
The blockchain 1.0 era has enabled the application of virtual digital currencies in the marketplace, such as money transfer and payment systems.
[36] Facebook's concept for the diem is based on a token to be backed by financial assets such as a basket of national currencies.
[39] Also in 2012, Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, was reported to analyze technological advances with regard to electronic money and payment methods for digital currency as an alternative to cash.
Because of this convenient source of income, commercial banks and credit card companies favor cashless payments.
The constant increase in digitization leads to a more detailed recording of cashless payment transactions and their evaluation for advertising and marketing campaigns.
On the other hand, the cash transactions are anonymous, unless purchasing profiles are recorded with the help of loyalty programs based on customer cards, and keep the payment landscape competitive.
