With credit cards, the pain of payment is delayed (until that monthly bill arrives, anyway). The great ability of credit cards, in other words, is that they wield the psychological power of separating the pleasure of buying from the pain of paying.
使用信用卡，付款的痛苦被延迟(直到每月的账单到达)。换句话说，信用卡的强大之处在于，它具有将购物的快乐与支付的痛苦分离开来的能力。
But with e-wallets, users can see that money is deducted immediately. Emily Belton, a British ex-pat who uses WeChat Pay in Beijing, says she likes getting a notification each time she pays with it, and her balance and payments are updated in real-time. This is instant feedback and so does not have the same effect as a credit card.
但电子钱包，用户可以看到钱被立即扣除。在北京使用微信支付的英国侨民贝尔顿(Emily Belton)说，她喜欢每次微信支付后收到通知，余额和付款会实时显示。这是即时反馈，因此与信用卡的效果不同。
In China, meanwhile, scanning QR codes with your smartphone, or generating QR codes on your smartphone to be scanned by merchants, was co-opted as a means of making payments. China’s rapid adoption of electronic payments is explained by the ubiquity of WeChat in the country, a super-app that includes e-payment/e-wallet, messaging, and social media functions; the popularity of e-commerce platforms, such as Alibaba’s Taobao platform; and the fact that China has relatively low rates of credit card usage. From around 2015, adoption of e-payments in day-to-day usage became much more prevalent.
在中国，用智能手机扫描二维码，或在智能手机上生成二维码供商家扫描，被当作一种支付方式。中国能迅速采用电子支付是因为：微信无处不在，这是一款超级应用，包括电子支付/电子钱包、短信和社交媒体功能;电子商务平台的普及，如阿里巴巴的淘宝平台;以及信用卡使用率相对较低的事实。从2015年开始中国普遍使用电子支付。
Nowadays, money is not tied to physical objects that are in themselves valuable commodities, such as gold or silver coins, but we use a form called fiat money which is a currency that a government has established as legal tender.
如今，货币不再与实物挂钩，实物本身就是有价值的商品，如金币或银币。我们使用的是一种被称为“法定货币”的货币形式，这种法定货币是由政府确立的。
As more societies move from cash-based to cashless, the way we spend might change. But money will remain a governing force in the lives of humans.
随着越来越多的社会，从以现金为基础的活动转向无现金的活动，我们的消费方式在发生改变。但金钱仍在人类生活中起主导地位。
