Money is just a physical representation of value to make bartering more efficient. I don't care how totalitarian the government is, they can't police two or more people trading one thing of value for another thing of value. It's typical liberal-think, though, to believe that you can kill an idea by controlling the physical manifestation. They believe you can control violence by outlawing guns (or knives) or eliminate racism by making 'hate speech' illegal. All they do is create a thin veneer on society that gives the appearance of these things, but underneath is still human nature the same as it always was. That's why I think they become more detached from reality as time goes on: because as they club people with the police power of the state into participating in their delusions their delusions are internally confirmed and their mental state continues to devolve. Imagine for a minute, that they ban cash. Now it's illegal to buy groceries without digital ID and digital currency. The instant that happens they've created a demand in the market for groceries that can be traded for something of physical value. Where there's a demand, there's a potential for profit and that means someone will step in to satisfy the demand. I can go to the grocery store with my digital ID and digitcal currency and buy things in high demand and then trade them with my neighbors who can't or won't use digital currency with a little bit of markup. The only way to police this is for the government to get itself into the business of deciding how much peanut oil a person is allowed to purchase each month, and do the same for every product available for sale in the United States. Oh, they'll try. But they will overwhelm themselves with the enormity of the task. The government bureaucracy will grow exponentially as they try to implement and enforce all these rules. Then there will be so many edge cases in the obedient population that get screwed by these rules that they'll be pushed into the underground economy too. Some of those people will be working in that bureaucracy and figure out they can make money for themselves taking bribes and looking the other way. The whole system becomes a sort of joke like not saying bad words in front of grandma. Eventually the government has very little credibility and society devolves into a high-corruption, low-trust state. We see it the world over, time and time again.