Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

This book shows how the globalization of trade, the digitization of the economy, tax competition between sovereign states, the erosion of the tax base, and the transfer of profits have all revealed the weaknesses of a traditional tax system that has reached its limits, and how numerous states...