Inside the Secret Meeting Where Wall Street Tested Digital Cash, by Matthew Leising. New technology for money will replace cash and allow banks and government to track every financial move we make. Cash is increasingly being killed off as  a means of storing significant money outside the banking system. From there, it is but a short move to blocking or allowing every purchase we make.

On a recent Monday in April, more than 100 executives from some of the world’s largest financial institutions gathered for a private meeting at the Times Square office of Nasdaq Inc. They weren’t there to just talk about blockchain, the new technology some predict will transform finance, but to build and experiment with the software.

By the end of the day, they had seen something revolutionary: U.S. dollars transformed into pure digital assets, able to be used to execute and settle a trade instantly. That’s the promise of a blockchain, where the cumbersome and error-prone system that takes days to move money across town or around the world is replaced with almost instant certainty. …

[A] huge piece of that puzzle is transforming cash into a digital form. And while some firms have conducted experiments, the Chain event showed a large number of them are now looking jointly at a potential solution.

“We created a digital dollar” to show the group at Nasdaq an instant debit and credit on a blockchain, said Marc West, chief technology officer at Fiserv, a transaction and payments company with more than 13,000 clients across the financial industry. “This is the first time the money has moved.”

Imagine the politically correct in charge of what you can spend, as well as what you can say in public and what you see in the media.