Technology advances have made the cashless society seem inevitable. The rise of mobile and electronic payments allow consumers to enjoy faster, more convenient, and more efficient purchases in many cases. Moreover, governments are also embracing it because it reduces money laundering and easier to stop tax avoidance. According to a MasterCard study, 80 percent of U.S. consumer transactions are electronic. In Sweden, about 59% of all consumer transactions are cashless, and hard currency makes up just 2% of the economy until 2016. Cash payments are only 15 percent of retail sales in Sweden, and some point to Sweden as the model for a modern cashless society. Within Germany, only 33% of consumer transactions are cashless, and there are only 0.06 credit cards in existence per person.
Undeniably, there are many advantages for living in a cashless society such as less time and costs associated with handling paper money as well as storing and depositing it; lower crime because there’s no tangible money to steal; easier currency exchange while traveling internationally. However, there is the dark side of a cashless society, it exposes your personal information to a possible data breach. If hackers drain your bank account, you’ll have no alternative source of money. Banks may start charging fees to compensate for possible negative interest rates.
Despite the above concern, we have made cash become less important in our day to day life and on the road to becoming a cashless society. Recently, as a new technology to support cashless payment, cryptocurrencies have become more and more important of the discussion. They’re already used for money transfers, and they introduce competition and innovation that may help keep costs low. But they currently have risks and regulatory hurdles that make them impractical for most consumers. Some may argue cryptocurrency holds the power to bring balance back to the force. Privacy coins are an anonymous, decentralized digital money. Several blockchain projects are offering private solutions on the blockchain – Monero, and ZCash worked to solve that problem by providing private transaction features. Although they have achieved private transaction on the blockchain, they did not allow privacy feature for the smart contract.
As we are heading to the cashless society, we need private cash like Origo to protect our privacy and enjoy the benefits of the cashless society. None of us want our private lives to expose to the world. Just as we don’t want the neighbors looking in our windows when we walk around naked – we don’t want some cold bureaucrat or corporation anonymously monitoring every second of every day of our lives. Origo.Network has developed a complete privacy preserving solution that supports normal hardware for smart contract input and output. In a nutshell, instead of using a user’s personal data directly, Origo.Network enables users to generate a cryptographic proof for computation of user’s data and use that proof to demonstrate in any application of who you are, what you have, etc. So that users can enjoy all the blockchain benefits while keeping their data and financial records private.
