The other side frames cashless as progress, but that mistakes convenience for security. A payments system's first objective is resilience, not speed. Cash works when networks go down, power fails, or a cyberattack freezes digital rails. Remove that backup and one outage or breach becomes an economic shutdown, hitting commuters and small vendors alike. Redundancy isn't nostalgia; it's risk management. Until digital systems are proven as reliable and universally accessible as physical cash, eliminating the fallback is a bad trade.

Sweden is often called the world's most cashless country, yet its own central bank still tells citizens to keep cash on hand for emergencies. My opponent's plan actually concedes my point: gradual rollout, testing, and keeping cash as a fallback. But a society with a cash fallback isn't cashless, it's hybrid. Cutting transaction costs and theft is fine, but the first objective is staying operational under attack or outage. Design fixes don't remove the single point of failure; they just manage it. Until digital rails match cash's resilience, eliminating the fallback is a bad trade.

Imagine a city that keeps a backup generator but calls itself off-grid. That's the other side's plan: keep cash during transition, add offline wallets, then call the destination cashless. But if cash must stay as an indefinite fallback, the system isn't cashless, it's hybrid, and that's the correct target. Offline digital wallets still need charged devices, working software, and identity checks; they're not equivalent to a paper note. My objective isn't to block innovation, it's to sequence it: harden the primary before removing the backup. Shipping first and hardening later puts the whole payment system at risk.