fair enough that you prefer it, but personal preference isn't really the point is it?
you said you're "still to see an example of a city being screwed because of an internet outage or programming issue"- so let me help you out there.
july 2024: CHAPS goes down in the UK. that's the system that moves about £345 billion per day between high street banks. same week, crowdstrike takes out banking systems globally. two separate issues, one week, absolute chaos.
2018: visa has a hardware failure across europe. 5 million transactions just.. fail. ten hours. nothing. people standing at tills with money in their accounts and absolutely nothing to show for it.
square, fiserv, tsys - all had outages in the last few years, each one leaving tens of thousands of merchants dead in the water.
last i checked, payment outages cost US retail alone something like $44 billion a year. not a theoretical risk, just tuesday.
oh, and there's currently a ransomware attack on a payment processor called bridgepay that's knocked out card payments for multiple cities in texas, michigan, wisconsin.. still ongoing. https://cybersecuritynews.com/bridgepay-ransomware-attack/
you're right that i'm overstating nothing. these things happen constantly, and when they do, the blast radius is enormous compared to your wallet getting nicked.
the forgery point is fine, i already said physical money has problems too. but a forged tenner affects one person. a downed payment processor affects a country. those aren't comparable problems and treating them as such is what i'm pushing back on.