The Middle Got Bigger

The book called it

Brett Scott published Cloudmoney in 2022 with one claim under everything else in it: nobody demanded a cashless society. The push comes from the parties who earn money sitting in the middle of every sale, the banks and card networks and payment apps. They all collect when a purchase routes through their computers, and a cash sale pays them nothing at all. The customer-demand story came out of their marketing departments.

A claim like that comes with a built-in test. Wait a few years and check on those middlemen. Did their take hold steady, or did it grow?

The bill went up

When Scott was writing, American swipe fees ran about $161 billion a year. In 2023 they set a record at $187 billion. The 2024 total came in at $236 billion once the fuller accounting landed, half again what it was the year the book shipped. Nothing about moving digits between computers got harder or costlier in those four years. The fee climbed because no shop owner in America has a number to call and negotiate that line down. Even Congress noticed, and the business press spent this spring asking why two networks get to set the price of buying groceries for an entire country.

And the fee doesn't stay at the register. Shops fold it into the shelf price, so everybody pays it whether they tap or not. The merchants' coalition figures the load at more than a thousand dollars a year per family. The man paying cash gets charged for a card network he never used, and his change helps fund the reward points on somebody else's card.

The banks got their charter

Scott's word for the money in your banking app was cloudmoney: numbers in a corporate data center that stand in for dollars the bank doesn't hold one-for-one. Last summer Washington passed the GENIUS Act, the first federal charter for stablecoins. This year the FDIC is writing the rules while the banks line up to mint their own tokens, and Forbes counts a $323 billion market they're suddenly claiming as theirs.

Understand what a bank stablecoin is before the ads teach you wrong. It's the same private bank money Scott described, upgraded to programmable. A programmable token can carry conditions about where it moves and who may hold it, written by the issuer and enforced by the software, and you will never be in the room where those conditions get set. A paper dollar carries no conditions at all.

The law that settles the argument

Here's the detail that settles the demand question for good. New York had to put a law into effect this year forcing stores to accept cash. Newsweek reports a bill moving in Washington that would do the same nationwide, for the six million Americans who still run their lives on paper money. Sit with what that means.

Nobody writes a law to protect something the market is keeping alive on its own.

If customers had actually voted for cashless with their feet, legal tender wouldn't need a statute to stay spendable at a register. The want was built. The cash option is getting squeezed hard enough that legislatures are stepping in front of it, and no market research will ever answer the demand question straighter than that law does.

The read in 2026

Scott's book reads better this year than it did new, which is a compliment to him and bad news for the rest of us. The middlemen take more than they did when he described them, and the pushback has moved into the statehouses. Read the book, then watch the fee reports and the token charters for yourself. So far the numbers have only moved one way.

Next: the full review of Cloudmoney, for the whole argument and the receipts.