The Sheep heist stands as an example of something interesting and new: a burglary we could all watch happen, in real time, if we so wanted. Bitcoin has at its core something of a contradiction, considering the libertarianism of many of its biggest fans — it escapes centralized control by sacrificing privacy. Every transaction is public and permanently recorded in the blockchain. It wrongly gets called “anonymous” because, yes, you can open a wallet completely anonymously, and even move money in and out of the cryptocurrency economy using untraceable cash. But that record is etched there for as long as Bitcoin exists; once the anonymity of your ownership is removed, every past transaction becomes a matter of public record. You could create a new wallet and hide your new transactions, sure, but you can’t get rid of your past.

Would you want everyone to know every business you buy something from, however innocuous? I’m going to guess no. Think of this prospect as similar to how Gmail gives its users more than enough space to store every email they ever send or receive, meaning that I now have 10 years — a whole third of my life! — stored on servers. The long-term, mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies would mean accepting the idea that, at any moment, your entire purchasing history could be revealed to the world at large.

Even the person who invented Bitcoin can’t cash out on their multimillion-dollar hoard because everyone knows whose they are. Satoshi Nakamoto may be a neo-Midas who turned zeroes and ones into gold, but he or she or they can never touch it, because it would destroy their most valuable possession: their anonymity.

I use Bitcoin as just an example here; this applies to cashless money in all kinds of forms. All money, digital or otherwise, is intimately tied up with issues of identity, privacy, and freedom. As countries around the world move toward a cashless future, our ability to access and experience those things will change accordingly.

Money has always been tied up with identity. The traditional story is that the original human economies were barter economies, based around swapping one thing for some other thing. If I was a prehistoric chicken farmer, for example, and I needed some wheat, I could suggest and make a fair trade with a local wheat farmer. But, of course, say they didn’t want chickens but arrowheads — money entered the scene as a mutually acceptable thing that both of us would accept in lieu of something “real.” (That precious metals like gold make for durable, long-lasting coins or bullion bars is also suggested as a reason why it’s they, and not, say, rare plants, that get used as currency.) This is the story that early economists like Adam Smith told, based pretty much on extrapolating modern capitalism and individualistic property rights backwards through time.

We now know that that isn’t exactly true. David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years focuses on searching for evidence of a barter system like this among early civilizations, but nothing really turns up. Barter exists, sure — just the other day I bartered a tummy rub for some peace and quiet from my barking puppy — but in small-scale villages and towns, where everyone knew everyone else, you didn’t need money. My needing some wheat today would mean getting some from someone else with it to spare, with the understanding that at some point I’d repay the favor with chickens or by making a door for my friend’s home, or whatever. Collective memory was the financial system, and your trustworthiness — your word — was your credit rating. Debts were an essential part of community bonding.

Money used to be, near literally, your reputation among your neighbors; as money became a more diffuse thing, abstracted away from each individual, its relationship to personal identity changed, too. (Think about all the ways being rich gives advantages and rights when other people only have the letter of the law, at best, to rely on.)

Physical cash brings with it something else, though, in that a big abstract financial system with paper notes and metal coins lends itself to anonymity and secrecy and privacy. This is important and underrated. Our ability to function in any society is directly dependent on whether we have money to spend, and being able to spend it without anyone — our friends, our family, our colleagues, our employers, our governments — knowing is to keep open avenues of personal freedom. It’s good that someone can buy birth control without it appearing on a credit card receipt that gets mailed to their spouse, for example.

The future is going to be cashless, though. That’s what we’re told by tech prognosticators, and what the clear trend has been since the first true credit card was dropped into Fresno, Calif., in 1958 by Bank of America as an experiment in making it easier for people to buy things. (As always with important but unknown moments from history, 99% Invisible has an episode about it.) That’s actually a recurring thing with this stuff — they call it “friction” now, but there are a surprising number of people obsessed with shaving as many seconds as possible off the time between choosing to pay and actually paying. (It’s an obsession that’s pretty much exclusively reserved for Americans — from here in Europe, with a banking system that’s been quicker to roll out things like contactless payments, apps like Apple Pay and Square, or even Venmo, seem pretty mundane.)

And, admittedly, there are some compelling reasons to want to get rid of cash. It can be bulky in day-to-day use, and the infrastructure involved in printing, minting, verifying, and protecting it is immense in larger economies. The European Union, for example, is going to stop printing 500 euro notes (allegedly nicknamed “bin Ladens” among terrorists, but who knows if that isn’t just another press-spread factoid) because they make it too easy to smuggle cash in large quantities. Meanwhile, the arms race between central banks and counterfeiters never ceases.

Fundamentally, though, these are problems of control for central authorities—and taking away the flexibility and anonymity of cash makes it easier for them to do all kinds of things.

Here’s one example: If you’re a government that likes to tell poor people what to do, welfare cards are better than cash, because they physically stop people from buying things you disapprove of. This happens around the world, with certain things — usually alcohol or cigarettes — off limits to people who are perceived to be undeserving of access until they “earn” it.

Another: Credit card companies, banks—whomever the middleman is—can also control whom they deem to be an appropriate kind of person to lend money. Then there’s Paypal and WePay, which regularly shut down sex workers’ income streams, for example, because they disapprove of “adult content.” It doesn’t really matter what your political stance is on each individual case — it should be worrying that organizations that rely on private donations can have their entire existence threatened, not by the judicial system or a democratically elected legislature, but by a group of companies who exist to skim something off the top.

The people who use cash the most are, inevitably, the poorest, the most excluded, and least able to access traditional forms of banking. Cashless societies, centralized with banks and credit cards or decentralized like Bitcoin, all have their entrance fees and limitations compared to the informality and flexibility of cash.

Maybe there’s a third way, though. Here’s a fascinating report from Quartz by Tonny Onyulo about the rebirth of the Somali economy as the country stabilizes in the aftermath of its long civil war. Somalia doesn’t really have a cash economy in the traditional sense, because it doesn’t have banks either. It’s skipping straight to cell phones:

The Hormuud Telecommunication Company, a Somali firm established in 2002 during a lull in violence, introduced mobile banking in the East African country around six years ago. Now, it is one of at least three companies offering mobile money transfers in Somalia, where 51 out of every 100 people has a mobile subscription (compared to 22, only three years ago), and around 40% of adults use mobile money accounts, according to 2014 data from the World Bank(pdf).

EVC Plus allows users to purchase cellphone airtime for themselves or family members, pay water and electricity bills, and transfer money. It’s also designed so that users can set up automated payments, SMS reminders and financial reports without an internet connection. Almost every merchant in Mogadishu, even hawkers on the street, accepts payment by cellphone using EVC Plus.

This is interesting for two reasons.

The first is that it’s still, really, a cash economy — it’s just happening via text messages instead of the physical exchange of money. It’s not truly anonymous, but neither is it regulated like you’d expect a banking system in the West to be. It’s a demonstration that the convenience of cashless money (it’s quick, and it’s certainly safer in a country like Somalia) doesn’t always have to come at the price the destruction of the informality cash brings.

The second is that it’s a solid demonstration that cashlessness is not a conspiracy. It’s easy to say that stuff like credit cards and contactless chips and SMS bank transfers are designed by people who want to control the population more thoroughly. The truth — the boring, Sisyphean truth — however, is that innovation just … happens, and capitalism is exceedingly good at offering new ways to pay for things. The switch to cashlessness will be piecemeal and incomplete for many years and decades. Even if each single example doesn’t feel too bad — I don’t really mind as much as I should that London Underground has a record of every trip I’ve ever taken — the total sum of its effects will be to build a panopticon, a prison of record.

We should definitely examine how cashless systems roll out across all these different pockets of the world, and how well or badly they replace what came before. We should also see the transition as part of larger narratives about states pushing greater surveillance of public and digital spaces—part of stories about social control, about identity and nationhood. It would be a tragedy for the thing that raises so many people out of poverty to also simultaneously be what puts them into the unavoidable position of being surveilled. After all, we are what we spend.