Completely agree that we will eventually be forced into a digital economy where currency ceases to exist in physical form.
However, the digital currency will still be limited on the ledger to being backed by treasury securities. Those are the only governmental financial instruments that give away the future labor of the citizens.
Going digital will lock the entire world into "promise of future labor" based currency.
It is those who amass claims on this future labor that hold immense power.
So many focus on currency, etc. The world economy has much more to do with who controls the future labor of others. That would primarily be the international banks.
As an example - when Bush went to war with Iraq, what do you suppose was one of the first things that occurred over there when the military gained control?
Iraq used to have their currency printed and distributed by their Treasury. You can think of this as the currency being backed by the "completed labor" of the citizens.
A central bank was install in Iraq to change its money supply to debt-based.
Read up on the history of the British "tally stick", and what happened when Queen Mary (legal heir to the throne) wed King William and established a co-monarchy, then died shortly after. King William proceeded to establish the Bank of England - just as he had previously done in Holland with the Bank of Amsterdam.
I feel like our current financial system is the biggest Ponzi scheme in all of human history. Think social security, fractional banking, quantitative easing, CB purchased securities, synthetic CDOs (weapons of mass financial destruction - Buffet) and etc.
I think Buffet got it right. In roughly the last 100 years, TPTB have laughed in the face of thousands of years of human monetary experience, putting at risk the well being of the entire world's population because of their greed for exponential growth of money.