Student Research Guide WQ24/ Cashless Societies/Digital Currency

• A cashless economy is when all payments, transactions, and commerce are done through electronic means, physical currency is not used or accepted.
• It very much seems to be the natural progression of technology and humanity, with enough time it will likely be inevitable. However, there are multiple groups around the world that do not believe it is inevitable and are actively fighting against the change.  
• There is a wide range of progress made toward a cashless society amongst different countries.
  • Countries like Sweden and India have made significant progress toward an official cashless economy
  • Countries like The Philippines, Egypt, and Morocco have made less progress
• The impacts on society are varied, neither wholly good or bad
  • Positive impacts include making it more difficult to hide crimes or evade taxes, offering more control and convenience to the consumer, being more difficult to lose or steal, and being more hygienic/sanitary. Along with many other beneficial effects.
  • Negative impacts include financial exclusion of people without bank accounts, largely impacting lower income people, minorities, undocumented immigrants, and those on the fringes of society, as well as reliance on technology/electronics that can fail.
• People need to accept that this transition is happening, and put their effort into working to find ways to adequately mitigate the impacts of the change.

Advice for future researchers:

There were two main stumbling blocks, for me, when researching this topic. I found it difficult to find key words and search terms that provided usable results, it was incredibly common to try a new search term and only get results for cryptocurrency specifically, instead of digital currencies as a whole. The other problem that I came across regularly was significant and clear bias in news articles and internet sites. 

Reflection on research experience:

The research process went relatively smoothly, the biggest hang up came with trying to find information that was both general and unbiased. Most of the information was either about specific countries or it was general but very clearly either for or against the cashless future. I greatly enjoyed learning about the different ways that are being tried to make the cashless economy available to the most amount of people with the least amount of harm. I went into my research with an opinion leaning toward the negative side of neutral, I felt like it wasn't necessarily a good thing, but it was probably inevitable. After researching I have more hope that there are ways to make this change work for more, if not all, people and really mitigate the potential harm.