I think one of the drivers for cashless that has come out of the pandemic, though it hardly needed emphasising, was just how much of a transmission vector cash can be.
We have all heard about cocaine contamination but the fact that literally dirty notes can harbour bugs is just another reason to consign them to history.
And don't worry, there are any number of people working on solutions to have the equivalent of cash transactions, even in the digital world, whereby there is no reason to track it or document it. Everything from the flipping a coin into a busker's hat to paying for a second hand chair you found on the local classifieds, doesn't need to be recorded centrally, stored and analysed.
I too am profoundly worried by the potential for a loss of privacy through the move away from cash, but to be honest, for most small transactions, most governments can't be arsed to keep track and are not interested.
Having done a fair bit of exploration professionally of blockchain technologies, which is the processing infrastructure behind cryptocurrency, there will be solutions pretty soon whereby you will have digital wallet from which you can spend certain amounts on certain things that will not be defined beyond the fact that it is there or it is not, preserving some of the utility, and privacy, of cash. Though it may draw some attention of you spend the digital equivalent of €50,000 on 'cat grooming'.
