I mean, it kinds seems inevitable to me. Books has become e-books. Cash is becoming digital transfers. China has done it. The west is mostly doing card-swipes. One day, that transition will be complete, and cash would be phased out.
What happens then? Think like the power outage in Spain recently. Some people had cash. But in 20-40 years. There might not even be any cash in existence. What then?
What if, instead of a few hours, its a few days? Or weeks?
I guess riots break out all around the world?
(Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this? Where are the backups? Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?)
People deciding on this will have what they have, because it’s other people obeying them first and foremost.
They also will have physical money when you won’t. At worst it’ll be pieces of gold or brilliants or whatever.
And you being left to rot in such a collapse is no problem. See how Russia’s regime just threw out dozens of thousands lives of those they consider unimportant, to utilize in a war. Those were mostly uneducated men from poor and depressive areas, for whom the money for that contract was something enormous.
“The politicians” is not some rotated pool of people in reality, it’s the same mafia layer. Most of them are of the same parts of the societies, there are no random people in power, at least not anymore. Not in the last 20 years, I think.
So, the answer to your question : then nothing. Your riots are inconsequential, they don’t affect most of power, there are Pareto laws everywhere, so if actually important logistics and information flow don’t stop, there may be riots for years without interruption, not changing anything. You might have read something like this about Iran, riots are a usual event for them, even despite rioters being sometimes murdered by security forces, sometimes even machine gunned. If something like that causes a problem for the elites, you’ll see rioters being machine gunned in Europe.
The fact that we see this all means that somehow our side of the stakes has lost any leverage and it’s all changing for how it’s better for them. As simple as that. “Cashless society” is about that too - where all your money is controlled centrally and can be, well, momentarily taken from you, being just bytes of data on spinners somewhere, and all you do with your money is surveilled by default.
OK, this was alarmist, dramatic and soap-opera like. But I do think that, because with the previous steps of that path what I describe has already happened 100%.