Silicon Valley is getting all excited again, in its Silicon Valleyish way, about the future of how we pay for things. The specific cause of excitement, this week, is the news that Richard Branson has made an investment in Clinkle, a mysterious startup that promises to revolutionise payments in some unspecified way, possibly by letting people send money from smartphone to smartphone using sound. (The company just put out a really strange advertisement that fails to clear things up.)

But predictions about the coming End of Cash have been around for years, growing louder since the arrival of contactless payment, of Square, and of Bitcoin. The other day, research from Tufts University gave the cause a new boost: cash, it revealed, costs US consumers, businesses and governments more than $200bn annually in everything from ATM fees and theft to lost tax revenue. Oh, and it helps spread disease. Could it be time, wondered Tim Fernholz at Quartz, to give up on cash entirely?

It's an intriguing question. But it has a simple answer: no! Leave aside for now the fantastical prospect of an actual, society-wide end of cash, with all the vast implications for economic policy, on the unbanked, etcetera, that that would entail. Just on a personal level, as we race headlong into the era of "frictionless spending" – in which waving goodbye to another $10 is as simple as a single click on an iPad or Kindle – there's a strong argument for starting to use cash much more.

There's plenty of psychological research to show that when we spend using physical notes and coins, we spend more sensibly. Of all forms of payment, cash is the most "transparent" – the one that connects us most directly to the fact that we're parting with our money. That's also why, as the behavioural economist Dan Ariely has argued, cashlessness seems to be associated with increased dishonesty: it's easier to cut ethical corners involving money, while continuing to think of yourself as an honest person, when you're psychologically distanced from the money involved. "We are moving to a situation which allows people to rationalise dishonesty to a much, much higher degree," Ariely told Wired Magazine last year.

The bigger point here is that "frictionlessness", that glorious promise of our cloud-based, disruptogasmic future, is a bad thing at least as often as it's a good one. Just as "frictionless sharing" on Facebook is how you unwittingly come to inform friends you've been reading all the latest naked celebrity news, frictionless spending is why my Kindle is loaded with quarter-read books on topics that interested me for 30 minutes once. Friction keeps you frugal. God-bothering personal finance expert Dave Ramsey goes so far as to suggest that you count cash into envelopes for each part of your household budget every month; that way you'll really feel it whenever you spend. (I tried the envelopes system, with partial success, last year.)

It's true, as the tech columnist Farhad Manjoo points out, that we could find ways to use technology to keep spending in check. You can use Mint.com, for example, to warn you when you're straying outside you budget. Financial institutions could offer to send smartphone alerts when you tried to buy items you'd previously specified as wasteful temptations. But the question – not least given our institutions' strong interest in keeping us spending – is whether such schemes are really likely to be widely adopted anytime soon. There's an easier solution, much closer to hand: whenever you're able, stick to cash.