No, not sleepwalking; actively, happily, gleefully running there.
The chance that a digital dollar will be implemented in the next 20 years is exceptionally high, and most of the population will go along with it—willingly. If the government does attempt to implement a digital dollar, there will be little resistance to it
It's just very easy, less clunky. Most people can't see the layered difference between cash and bank deposits, the permissioned nature of the latter. And there's no good argument to pose for habits to change, for peeps to willingly go the other way—at least not until bad things like debanking happens, or hyperbitcoinization comes around, which doesn't exactly look promising anyway (#927854, #908702)
Part of this is consumer preferences—paying with a card or a phone is less awkward and clumsy than having a bunch of change slamming around your pocket. But what we gain in convenience, we lose in privacy and freedom
privacy has value, though nobody acts like it:
Just because one isn't doing anything illegal doesn't mean one wants the government to know where they go to lunch every day. If you have a complete electronic record of someone's economic activity, you have a pretty good idea of who they are as a person, which is why economic privacy is so important.
A sad present. Will we have a worse future?