The next great leap of the digital age is, quite literally, going to hit you in the wallet.

Those dollar bills you fold up and stash away are headed, with inexorable certainty, toward cryptographically sealed digital streams, stored on a microchip-loaded "smart card" (a plastic card with a microchip), a palm-sized "electronic wallet" (a calculator-sized reader and loader for those cards), or the hard disk of your computer, wired for buying sprees at the virtual mall

real money - the trillions of dollars handled each day by banks, other financial institutions, and government clearinghouses - is already digital

digitizing the final mile of electronic money, where the coin and dollar bill go the way of the vinyl LP, will make all the difference in the world

It will not only change the physical way you spend your money, it will alter the way you view your own economic being