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Well, your friend wasn't totally crazy (nor was mine TBH, the trends looked bad). A few countries have more or less eliminated paper money. India was a very high-profile one, because lots of older people in India had savings stored under the mattress or whatever that were scheduled to become worthless...they had to postpone it a couple times. And a few European countries (I wanna say Finland? maybe Estonia?) have more or less got rid of physical currency.
A person might see those datapoints and extrapolate from that that it's only a matter of time before all countries would be paperless, without accounting for differences in culture. I can't see the US getting rid of paper currency...uhh...anytime soon, let's say.
Can confirm that thing about Finland. Physical currency has been eliminated almost entirely. Or well… at least the need for physical currency is pretty much gone at the moment, but some people still use it.
When it comes to buying and selling stuff between individuals, It’s not uncommon to find a person who won’t accept mobile payments, but wants paper instead. All the stores obviously accept paper and metal, but more and more people pay with a card or a phone. There are some excetional stores that only accept electronic payments, but that’s limited to small companies that can’t be bothered to deal with coins. All the medium and large stores have the means to accept both physical and electronic payments.
I can’t exactly remember when that prediction was supposed to come true, but I think it was something like 2010 or something like that. Seeing how slowly these things actually change, I would guess it’s going to take like 50 years untill all payments are fully electronic and physical currency is fully eliminated. Could take longer. Who knows.