Cash Or Plastic Card?

I have a £50 banknote in my pocket. I go to a restaurant and pay for my dinner with it. My friend and I enjoy our meal, and we understand the point of eating out; the meal is a space for us to feel free to talk on any subject we like as we eat, and we don't have to wash up after we have eaten.

I pay the restaurant owner with the £50 who then uses the same £50 note to pay for the restaurant's laundry where the damask table clothes the customers have eaten off are sent to be washed. The laundry owner then uses the note to pay their barber for several haircuts. The barber will then use the note to pay for their food shopping. Allowing for inflation, after an unlimited number of transactions, the £50 that I tendered for the meal will still remain worth £50 and still buy whatever £50 buys. It has kept it's value and fulfilled its purpose by everyone, whether they bought material goods or services, whoever has used it for payment and no bank charge was incurred in any cash transaction made with the money.

But if I go to a restaurant and pay digitally via a credit or debit card and don't pay the Visa bill before any interest charges occur, the bank fees for my £50 payment transaction are charged to the seller are 3% - so around £1.50. And for every further transaction via credit with the original £50, that sum will eat up another 3 % in bank charges. With three credit card transactions the original £50 will be worth approximately £45.50, allowing for how as the total sum reduces so 3 % of each new total is slightly less than £1.50. With 30 transactions the initial £50 will be worth £45 bank charges with only £5 of it's original worth, adapted for inflation, still in circulation.

Even in a totally cash-based world there are ways of making money depreciate in value, ways for some of making others pay through the nose for badly organised services, or by simply hiking up prices. But for as long as people can count, and as long as the language around money is kept simple, then individuals in a cash-based society know where they are with each other much more the equivalent citizens in 'cashless', or credit card based, societies....

Use your cash whilst you can folks, or lose the value of your money via the opaque language used by banks…