> I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps.
This sounds like... a poor choice of a hill to die on? The people who need cash the most tend to be poorer; asking them to pay more would be just cruel to many of them. There are lots of things (like taxes in general....) where some people benefit more than others from them, but we ignore that and just distribute the burden equally as a matter of principle instead of asking everyone to pay proportionally to what they use.
Edit: But the homeless on the streets where I live that sell magazines etc accept mobile payment. And I've worked for the main government welfare agency a few years providing help to these people, and an assumption / basis was that they had a phone to be contacted on, which proved to work fine for most of them.
This is really going on a tangent that's beside my point on the fees, but are you genuinely suggesting people can treat payments like phone calls or texts -- things that tolerate long delays? If someone calls you and your phone is unavailable for whatever reason, they can back later, even tomorrow or in a week. Or maybe you borrow someone's phone to call back. You... can't do any of this when you're trying to make a payment on the spot. Especially when you're poor.
If an electronic solution is ever going to work at all, it needs to be something that's not powered. Like debit cards, not phones. But even with those, there are so many giant problems here that I don't have the energy to go on the tangent.
In places where you can get life by with just a phone and a card, even poor people have phones. So perhaps this reality is already changing in favor of the poorer?
I'm sure it's going in that direction but to what extent we'll reach that point remains to be seen. Note that people lose phones and have to go without them for a while (again, probably more for poor people than others), not to mention even remembering and finding the time to charge them constantly, so it's not as simple as giving everyone a phone. Bear in mind there are lots of other reasons to keep cash; I was just addressing the fee idea.
Even in the US! one of the lesser known programs is the Obamaphone program, where subsidized low cost handsets were provided to low income individuals.
This sounds like... a poor choice of a hill to die on? The people who need cash the most tend to be poorer; asking them to pay more would be just cruel to many of them. There are lots of things (like taxes in general....) where some people benefit more than others from them, but we ignore that and just distribute the burden equally as a matter of principle instead of asking everyone to pay proportionally to what they use.