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Ketharaman,

The trend towards declining use of cash  is certain. However the rate of decline you have assumed is uniform..It need not be so..if you take a phase transition approach..there comes a tipping point till when the steady decline may be appropriate and at such point the decline can much faster..even exponential in its rates.

How will we know the tipping point or when can we expect ? Often the tipping point occurs when the external infrastructure is adequate enough to engender a behavioural shift in the people.

In our personal lives, what is our attitude to making a cash payment.. I find it a chore that I need to go and get cash out for certain transactions and when inconveniently located I have to pay a fee to withdraw Cash so that I can use it to spend for certain of my expenses.. I would always prefer paying by card / digital means than cash.

Digital spend of cash also has the advantage of being able to use the data to drive insights and value to the customer ... When banks / service providers are able to provide adequate tools to allow customers to analyse their spend and draw insights not just on their transactions with their bank but on their spend overall ... and when us as customers we get used to the ease and advantage of these self-servcie analytics.. the preference will shift faster to non-cash means..

These are not hypothetical but already happening in small ways though..

Again we will know when the tipping point is nearing / occurred when people are actually charged for making a cash transaction in much the same way we incur (implicitly or explicitly) a charge of card payments.

In a nutshell there is nothing inherently superior about Cash as an instrument facilitating exchangge of value and current day solutions / infrastructure are not broadbased enough or penetrated deep enough .. yet... all the activity we are witnessing now and will see over the netx few years  will create the necessary infrastructure..

my hypothesis is that the cashless society could be a reality localised to certain cities or even some countries over the next 30-50 years..