Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price
point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets
made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to
incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost
"intelligent cash".
For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored,
decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and
using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to
plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw
tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key
set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.
It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable
portable artifacts to transfer value.
Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost "intelligent cash".
For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored, decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.
It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable portable artifacts to transfer value.