In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity, that you just don't get from Visa.

It's funny to consider, then, how cash is in fact quite amenable to automation. Even Benjamin Franklin's face on a piece of paper can feel like a mere proxy for a database transaction. How different from "e-cash" is cash itself, when it starts and ends its lifecycle through automation? Increasing automation of cash reflects the changing nature of banking: decades ago, a consumer might have interacted with banking primarily through a "passbook" savings account, where transactions were so infrequent that the bank recorded them directly in the patron's copy of the passbook.

Over the years, nationwide travel and nationwide communications led to the ubiquitous use of inter-bank money transfers, mostly in the form of the check. The accounts that checks typically drew on—checking accounts—were made for convenience and ease of access. You might deposit your entire paycheck into an account, it might even be sent there automatically... and then when you needed a little walking around money, you would withdraw cash by the assistance of a teller. By the time I was a banked consumer, even the teller was mostly gone. Today, we get our cash from machines so that it can be deposited into other machines.