THIS week Apple announced two new pieces of hardware, the iPhone 6 and a “smartwatch.” But as flashy as they are, neither item is as groundbreaking as a piece of software that will accompany them: a digital wallet, allowing users to eschew cash and credit cards for a quick swipe of their device at the register.

Apple’s digital wallet, if widely adopted, could usher in a new era of ease and convenience. But the really exciting part is the fast-emerging future that it points toward, in which virtual assets of all sorts — traditional currencies, but also Bitcoin, airline miles, cellphone minutes — are interchangeable, opening up enormous purchasing power for consumers and creating tough challenges for governments around the world.

Moving toward a digital wallet for dollars (or yen, or euros) is only a marginal step forward; throughout history, money’s value has been largely virtual anyway — think of stocks, or personal lines of credit. The real change is how the digital wallet technology facilitates the parallel emergence of virtual purchasing power, like loyalty points.

We don’t typically think of these as currency, because virtual money has traditionally been locked down, in the sense that its use was strictly limited: If you earned points from Amazon, only you could use them, and you could exchange them for dollars only within the Amazon marketplace. Meanwhile, up to now, the only currencies you could use everywhere in an economy were state-issued currencies, like the dollar.