How to Buy Things in the Future[A] Now cash and plastic are fading in popularity, and possibly faster than you realize. Maybe you already pay for your morning coffee with just your mobile phone. Soon enough, thanks to advances in biometrics, you might pay with just your face. Well before the end of the century, wallets will likely be museum pieces.
[B] Futurists sometimes joke that the prospect of a cashless society is much like that of a flying car, it's often promised, but it never materializes. And yet some banks in Sweden no longer dispense cash. Most airlines won't accept cash for in-flight purchases. A number of restaurants, including New York's Commerce, have begun refusing greenbacks, accepting only credit and debit cards."It's more portable, and no one has to worry about losing money," says Tony  Zazula, Commerce's owner, who notes that the change has made accounting much simpler. Here, drawn from interviews with futurists, economists, executives, and entrepreneurs, are other predictions about the future of money.
[C] The shift from credit cards to phone-based payment systems is, of course, well under way. Starbucks, for example, says that 13 million people actively use its mobile app, which allows customers to debit prepaid Starbucks accounts. And this summer, a union of 70 chains (members include CVS and Walmart., will launch a version of an app called CurrentC in a test market. The group hopes that the app will eventually let people in 110,000 locations pay (out of their checking accounts) via phone. Such apps will use customer data to offer shoppers targeted coupons, and could give merchants a newly detailed look at what consumers are buying, says Ben Jackson, an industry analyst with Mercator Advisory Group.
[D] As mobile-payment technologies improve, checking out stands to get speedier. Both Current C and the Starbucks app ask customers to scan a bar code on their phone. Apple Pay and Google Wallet likewise require a consumer to pull out her phone and hold it to a reader. Future mobile-payment systems could use Bluetooth Low Energy technology, which doesn't require a customer to be as close to a checkout counter. (Already, some Safeway and Macy's stores use iBeacon, Apple's indoor positioning system, to push deals to iPhones). For that matter, Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist at the research institute SRI International, thinks checkouts could pretty easily be dispensed with altogether. If Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags were attached to merchandise, a sensor at a store exit could register both a customer's phone and the RFID tags on whatever she was carrying, and those items would be hers.
[E] Merchants can be slow to adopt technologies that are costly to install. But many retailers have already begun upgrading their systems to accept mobile payments, and we may be surprised by how quickly phone-based transactions increase. For one thing, allowing customers to pay by phone can save retailers costly credit-card transaction fees, Jackson says. For another, mobile payments tend to be more secure than credit-card transactions. In some new mobile-payment systems, when a phone is scanned, no bank-account data are passed through the cloud; if hackers broke in, they'd see only the unique strings of numbers that are generated for each purchase, which are useless for anything else. In the aftermath of recent data breaches, this security edge may be especially compelling to retailers. "I have a feeling that 20 years from now, everything now done by plastic will be done by a smartphone," says Robert Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
[F] Phones are only the beginning. RFID tags are already so small that they could fit in a watch, or even under your skin. Such implants aren't science fiction: one techie, Areal Graafstra, has written about how he installed RFID tags in his hands and RFID readers on various doors in lieu of locks, so that he wouldn't have to bother with keys anymore.
[G] Eventually, biometrics might allow you to carry (or implant. nothing at all) A Swedish start-up called Quixter has outfitted stores at Lund University with a system that lets students pay by having the vein patterns in their hands scanned.
[H] Iris (虹膜) scanners have potential, too -- they're hard to trick, and eyes, unlike hands, don't change much with age, says Hector Hoyos, the founder of Hoyos Labs, which works on identity-authentication technologies. Hoyos thinks payments could one day be processed automatically --imagine your eyes being scanned as you enter an amusement park, the price of admission being deducted from your bank account as you get in line for your first ride.
[I] Scott Rankin, the chief operating officer of Merchant Customer Exchange, the consortium (财团 .behind CurrentC, says users will be able to alter their privacy settings to ensure that information about what they buy isn't used or shared. But as Epstein, the computer scientist at SRI, points out, many people won't mind sharing data if they believe they're being compensated with good deals."Most people are fundamentally lazy and will do whatever is easiest," he told me. "What's going to be easiest is not being anonymous."
[J] Not so long ago, it looked as if we might be on our way to a single global currency, or two or three. European countries eagerly abandoned their national currencies in favor of the euro; in 2009,Zimbabwe began using other countries' currencies. Economically, these experiments haven't worked out well. And in fact, as digital technologies advance, shoppers are likely to use more currencies rather than fewer. From a merchant's perspective, accepting digital pesos or rubles is less costly than accepting foreign bills and coins.
[K] As mobile technologies let stores track shoppers' behavior more closely, customer-loyalty programs are likely to become more prominent, says Heather Schlegel, a futurist. Better data on buying habits will likely lead to more-targeted, and therefore more-enticing, offers. Stores might well begin to accept one another's loyalty points: already, gamers can use Subway and Burger King gift cards to buy virtual goods for online games; down the road, you might be able to use, say, your Disney Dollars to pay for things at Walmart.
[L] Today, retail customers' most frequent interactions with banks involve cash and credit cards. As cash disappears and phones replace plastic, banks may struggle to remain relevant. Already, around the world, new services are enabling people to move money without any bank at all. In Korea,for example, people load value onto T-money cards, which started out as fare cards (the T is for "transportation". and can now be used in taxis and at vending machines. In Kenya and other parts of the developing world, people can walk into a convenience store, deposit cash into an account managed by a service called M-Pesa, then transfer the money to other users via text message.
[M] Theoretically, the more popular alternative financial instruments and currencies become, the less control national governments will have -- over law enforcement, over taxation, over the very functioning of their economies. After all, if most Americans were to start using bit coins or rewards points as everyday currencies, fewer dollars would circulate in the economy, and the Federal Reserve's ability to affect the supply of money and regulate interest rates would in turn be limited.