The high cost of cash

I understand the cost you are referring to but untill there are some good privacy rules in place cash will still be king. 

I understand the crime relation but the government and the police currently already abuse their power for getting a lot of data about us, sometimes without warrant, from our phone provider, public transport (oyster card), internet provider, etc... 

It's almost reaching like reaching an orwellian future.

That would not be a problem if all that data would be properly managed but recent history shows that that isn't the case.

Perhaps a nice option would be just to make all the data public so that it is not only the government or the police who can check you but you can also check them.  

I do not think cash usage is driven by privacy fears - rather inertia - much caused by the belief that use of cash is not causing consumers a 50bn of costs.

I have not come accross authorities abusing power in the data field - rather the other way around here - it is made almost too difficult for them to get at criminals.

I agree with all your suggestions on how to minimize cash use. However, I'm not so sure that cash use has to be minimized beyond the levels chosen by consumers.

As I'd pointed out in a recent Finextra blog post, e-payments still have too much friction to become viable alternatives to cash and other traditional forms of B2C and C2C retail payments involving the common man. Cash handling certainly has costs but so does finding and using account number, sort code and other information required to put through ePayments. In fact, before making any ePayment, I do a sub-dollar test transaction to "pipe-clean" the process, thus making me do lot more work as compared to checks or cash. While things may change going forward, at this point, I'd be happy to pay for cash usage than spend my time to ensure that my ePayments are executed correctly. And, by the way, if the cost situation is really so much in favor of ePayments, I'm curious to know why banks charge for ePayments but not for checks.  

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5970

The main alternative to cash in proximity payments is the debit card. Invoices should be issued for all other sales - and sending a notification as SMS with press a approval makes the transaction electronic. 

Cheques were eliminated in Finland in 1983 when we introduced fees. Many banks do charge for cheques - and I agree that all should. Charging for e-payments and e-banking is naturally based on the value these deliver.