Perhaps people may be driven to Sandy's (et al) digital cash simply because the technology to counterfeit paper cash is becoming more reliable and available with each passing day.
Well, ordinary people won't be driven to digicash by this -- after all, it doesn't much matter to the holder whether a given greenback was printed by the Treasury or not, as long as it circulates. And it *will* circulate even if the printing isn't perfect, because nobody but the SS actually looks at the fine details of bills. (The hard part would probably be the texture, weight, and thickness, but I don't think I'd be allowed to do a study.) The point of anti-forgery features in bills is to restrict to the government the power to debase the currency. :-) Forgery, however, may drive the *government* to digicash, and you can bet it won't be the good kind of digicash. Hmm, we've heard that eliminating cash would hit "drug kingpins". We've heard that Syria(?) is printing large quantities of U.S. bills, so we have the terrorism link. I'm waiting from a story to break which ties child pornography to conterfeiting... Eli ebrandt@hmc.edu