[jameson71]

That doesn’t sound a lot different than “hiding” the cash. If she is working, the husband knows she is getting money.

I do not think the loss of privacy is worth the convenience when talking about replacing cash in a society.

[lxgr]

I fully agree, but in fact stored-value cards offer a plausible path forward for private electronic money:

Most existing stored-value systems use "shadow accounts" for reconciliation (in case one of the card-level private keys gets compromised and makes it possible to "double-spend" electronic cash), but that's not really a required part of the system. If it's secure enough, it's possible to just leave these out!

It's probably also possible to create some kind of hybrid system which does create pseudonymous traceable logs which offer some trade-off between privacy and security, similar to how banknotes have serial numbers which can theoretically be traced, but practically mostly aren't.

And the enormous advantage of a privacy-preserving e-cash/stored-value system over cash is that it works on the internet too.