In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, Lana Swartz, who studies the history and future of money at the University of Virginia, reflects on monetary tools that serve public interests. Cash, she argues, is the best financial technology that solves for community development and individual autonomy.

Why should we care?
Swartz pushes technologists to think about what does work about a cash-based economy, including the difficulty to replicate cash, its autonomy (you don’t need a signature to spend cash, it can be used in any context, no data is generated for third parties, and it’s fee-free), its transparency (you know how much you have), and its resilience (it doesn’t rely on vulnerable infrastructure to keep humming). Swartz warns that introducing a slew of new digital currencies can bring us back to the U.S. monetary landscape preceding the Civil War, in which consumers had to channel their “street smarts” to determine which currencies were worth their weight, and which ones weren’t. That future already seems to be here in some ways, with the recent collapse of Luna and crypto’s nosedive since the start of the year. But cash doesn’t work online, Swartz acknowledges, and it can be lost or stolen. “As we imagine money for the internet era, the big question is how to design payment media in the public interest,” she concludes. “We need something that does all the things cash does well—as well as the things cash doesn’t.”