While paying for that Starbucks latte on Apple Pay and using Venmo to split the restaurant bill with friends, you might be tempted to think paper money is becoming a thing of the past.
But smartphones aside, cash isn’t going away anytime soon, says currency expert Bill Maurer.
A cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the relationship between currency and technology, Maurer was part of a small group of academics asked by the U.S. Treasury to offer input on the $10 bill redesign. Buzz has surrounded the new bill after news broke that it would feature a prominent female figure.
Maurer, UC Irvine’s dean of social sciences and director of the school’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, had a lot to say on the topic when the group convened in August at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
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