No Paper, Please

I read this article today. I was reminded of my own thoughts when I was 14 or 15 (back when there was no credit card / ATM card. I used to wonder why we all needed to carry cash around. Why couldn't we have some kind of a personal ID that would indicate the amount of cash we had? If I wanted to give you some money, I could say give it to Bozo. Voilaa if the money could be "paid", cashless, from my ID to yours, we would never need to have paper notes, metal coins.

I have had a strong dislike for physical things and preferred "soft" copies / electronic alternatives. Even now I have almost completely stopped reading hard copy books or newspapers. What a waste of paper!

I remember the times when we were to travel to our home town 2000km away. My father would go to the railway booking office and stand in line for a few hours. There would be immense crowd. God help you if you had to change your travel date or cancel your ticket. If you were in city A, you could not book a ticket to travel from city B to city C. And now all these are thing of the past. 

In late 1980's if you had to call a number in the US and if you didn't have a telephone (India's teledensity was 1%, meaning 1 telephone per 100 people, you had to go to the post office, fill in a form and give it to the person there. When your turn came, the person would dial the number you had mentioned in the form and transfer the call to one of the telephones for public use in the post office and you took the call on that phone. And then would start the loud "HELLO, HELLO. I am speaking, HELLO HELLO". If you wanted a fixed line telephone, there was no mobile phone then, you had to book a phone and it would take about 7 to 8 years for your turn to come and get the phone installed.

Now the teledensity is 50%+. Almost everyone has a phone. You can call anywhere from a park. But the "HELLO, HELLO. I am speaking, HELLO HELLO" continues. Network and signal quality are not so good.

Coming back to the cashless system, while I had idly imagined such a mechanism decades back, it seems to be a reality in Sweden.