Back in 2019, Jason Perlow wrote an article on the coming cashless society. In it, he bemoans having to carry a wallet and keys and all the rest of it. I understand his frustration because it echoes my own. Like him, I am looking forward to a walletless and keyless lifestyle.
Unlike him, I am not looking forward to having an implanted RFD chip to accomplish all this. I’m perfectly happy to have all this handled with my smartphone or, perhaps, something like the Apple Watch. Even Perlow admits that implanting RFD chips may be a bridge too far for most people. Still, his main thesis holds: it’s time to get rid of wallets and keys.
In the wake of the corona virus pandemic, Perlow has written another article speculating that COVID-19 is making the cashless society more necessary and will accelerate its acceptance. These days, no one wants to be handling cash or even pushing the buttons on a payment terminal. Perlow has admitted that implanted RFD chips probably won’t be accepted soon but believes that their smartphone/smartwatch proxies will become more and more commonplace and will eventually replace wallets and keys.
He sees interoperability as the major impediment to this future. For example, Apple Cash is a great way of giving cash to people or businesses as long as the recipient is an Apple user. Likewise, Google is implementing its own cash and credit card solutions but they won’t work for Apple users. Perlow says that in order to succeed in replacing cash, these technologies will need to interoperate with each other so that we can deal with all businesses and people. Whether Apple and Google can bring themselves to cooperate on this is an open question but their cooperation on COVID-19 tracking does give one reasons for hope.