Phone Purchasing

By Doug Gross:

How about you? You for this? Against this?

(CNN) — Most Internet users and tech experts think cash and credit cards will become things of the past in the next decade as people turn to their mobile phones to make payments, results from a newly released survey suggest.

Nearly two out of three respondents to the survey (65%) told the Pew Internet & American Life Project that they think most people will have fully adopted the “mobile wallet” as their day-to-day means of paying by 2020.

Whether it’s paying for coffee with a mobile app, using more versatile apps such as Google Wallet or doing business using tools such as Square that turn phones into mobile cash registers, the adoption of mobile payments is clearly under way…

And it’s a bit more theoretical too:

In the survey released Tuesday, 65% of respondents agreed with the following statement:

“By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards. People will come to trust and rely on personal hardware and software for handling monetary transactions over the Internet and in stores. Cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared from many of the transactions that occur in advanced countries.”

Survey respondent and Harvard University professor Susan Crawford wrote, “There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system. The idea that we solemnly hand around printed slips of paper in exchange for food and water shows just how trusting and fond of patterned behavior we human beings are.”

Crawford, an ex-special assistant for technology policy for President Barack Obama, asked, “So why not take the next step? Of course, we’ll move to even more abstract representations of value.”