The Next King's Definitive Set.

Interesting question. In general, I am wondering how many years of circulating coinage there are ahead of us.

They have been predicting the imminent demise of coins for a while now. While the eventual obsolescence of circulating coinage (at least, up until the next Dark Age) is near-certain given advances in technology, exactly when this happens depends on the society in question.

I think Britain is less attached to the continuation of coins than America is, for example.

The global trend is that younger people, and city-dwellers generally, are much more inclined to go cashless, since they're much less likely to encounter a transaction where cash is required or preferred. From my observations-from-afar, America still has a large and politically powerful "conservative rural" demographic, which is much less likely to trust in electronic money, and more suspicious of the potential for government/corporate surveillance that goes with it. Britain does not have that same strong conservative demographic and its people have shown much more tolerance for the encroachment of government surveillance into their everyday lives.

COVID has advanced the cause of cashlessness considerably; governments in many countries actively discouraged coin and banknote use, due to concerns over spreading the contagion, and many people who previously used to use cash a lot have discovered as a result that going cashless really is quicker and more convenient. We're probably ten years closer to the cashless economy than we were prior to COVID.

I have to admit, I myself use cash much less right now than I did prior to COVID. I just... got out of the habit of carrying cash around - during all the lockdowns I had no use for physical cash - and haven't found it necessary to get back in the habit again. I sold some coins a few months ago and they gave me AU$500 cash, in $100 notes. It took me months to get rid of it.