In 2017 Hurricane Maria knocked out Puerto Rico's power and payment networks for weeks, and cash became the only medium of exchange — stores couldn't process cards, and people without paper money simply couldn't buy food or water. That's the core of my case: a cashless society builds a single point of failure into the entire economy. My opponent will likely point to convenience and lower transaction costs, and those are genuine. But convenience isn't worth a system that fails completely for anyone outside the digital grid — the elderly, the poor, disaster survivors. Sweden's own central bank has warned about exactly this. Redundancy is a feature, not nostalgia.

Imagine a commuter during a regional outage: the card terminal is dead, the phone is dead, and the only question is whether they have paper money for bread. My opponent frames this as bad implementation versus good design, and that's a fair distinction. But no design removes the dependency on electricity, connectivity, and identity verification; offline backups still need charged devices and functioning merchants. Cash's costs, like tax evasion and robbery, are real, yet a parallel cash system is the cheapest redundancy available. A cashless society doesn't just optimize payments; it removes the fallback everyone relies on when systems fail.

World Bank data put roughly 1.4 billion adults outside the formal banking system, and for them a cashless society isn't a convenience upgrade, it's exclusion. My opponent's offline stored-value wallets sound elegant, but they still require enrolment, a charged device, and identity verification; cash requires none of those. That's why the hurricane example isn't merely bad implementation: even well-designed digital redundancy depends on infrastructure that disasters, poverty, and age can remove. The other side is right that cash carries real costs. But a parallel cash system is the cheapest universal fallback, and removing it is a bad idea.