Better to think of the haves and the have-laters. In the end, the choice resides with individual consumers. Morgan Stanley's chief economist, Steve Roach, posits that people are already buying PCs instead of cars. With the arrival of secure transaction mechanisms and digital cash, the new economy is about to take off. Secure transaction mechanisms mean encrypted communications that cannot be hacked by criminals.
Digital cash means electronic money that is as anonymous as cash.
Both of those carry serious consequences for the state. Over the past couple of years, you might have noticed that the government has been waging a war against cryptography. To that end, it attempted to force a chip into every telecommunication device that would let it eavesdrop at will, the so-called Clipper Chip. And in 1994 Congress passed a law to force telecommunications companies to facilitate wiretapping by government law enforcement and security agencies. What the government is really scared about is not nuclear terrorism or child pornography, however.