In the springAdam Smith will replace SirEdwardElgar as the face onBritain’s ￡ 20 note. The first economic thinker to be so honored could well be the last. Not because economists are especially undeserving, but because cash, after millennia as one of mankind’s most versatile and enduring technologies, looks set over the next 15 years or so finally to melt away into an electronic stream of ones and zeros. If an era is represented by its money, the information age is at hanD、 Notes and coins are already a small fraction of the money in most rich countries.But going by the number of transactions rather than their value, we still live firmly in a cash society. TheEuropean PaymentsCouncil estimates that theEuropean Union’s 360 billion cash transactions cost at least ~50 billion a year; others put the bill at ￡200 a heaD、Visa, a huge credit-card alliance, reckons cash accounts for most of the $1.3 trillion spent a year across the world on small-ticket items. Whether queuing to get money out and queuing again to spend it, or breaking a $100 bill with an irate (发怒的) cab driver one minute and having your pockets and purses fat with coins the next, cash is plainly still king. Yet signs of the new order are everywhere. On February 12th, 19 telephone operators with networks in over 100 countries said that people would be able to use their handsets to send money abroaD、MasterCard will operate the system in which remittances (汇款) will be sent as text messages. For people without bank accounts, the credit can be converted into pre-paid cards which can then be used to buy things. "It will revolutionize the money-transfer business," said SunilBharti Mittal, boss ofBhartiAirtel, one of India’s biggest mobile operators. The idea is to tap into the more than $250 billion a year that immigrants and migrant workers send to relatives and friends back home. Britain’s Vodafone andAmerica’sCitigroup are also launching an international money-transfer service developed from the M-PESA、remittance service which is already operating successfully within KenyA、Sir JohnBond, formerly chairman of the HSBC、banking group and now chairman of Vodafone, has long been convinced that payments and mobiles would somehow converge. "Mobile phones have the ability to make a dramatic change to village life inAfrica," he says. He also thinks phones loaded with credit will make many of the payments people use cash for in rich economies. For banks with high infrastructure costs, says Sir John, it has always "been hard to make money out of small payments".But lower-cost business models, some of them from developing countries, are opening up new opportunities. The big attraction of the mobile phone as a purse is that so many people have them - even children. Both MasterCard and Visa have recently introduced plastic cards inAmerica that do not have to be swiped for purchases under $25. Later this year a "dual interface" system will be tested in London. It will involve a single plastic card which combines an Oyster for travel, a standard Visa card issued byBritain’sBarclaysBank for "chip and PIN" payments and a new "wave and pay" Visa for instant transactions up to ￡ 10. Nobody can be sure how fast bits and bytes will drive out metal and paper.A、hundred years ago you could still pay your taxes in Uganda in cowrie shells. Perhaps hard cash will always find a niche, tucked away in children’s birthday cards and as money for the unbanked and phoneless.But most of the time a phone or a smart card that can be waved over an electronic reader will beat notes and coins hands-down. The doubt - and the remaining obstacle to digital money - concerns a third property of cash: its anonymity. Gresham’s law vs Moore’s law Rendering cash as pure information is the final denial of the notion that money has intrinsic value: what was once a carefully weighed piece o
试题查看
参考答案： 
答案解析