That cap has always and still does exceed the median worth.

> cap on how much you could bring

Bring to where ? Are you mapping the crypto wallet concept to the physical wallet concept as a mobile storage concept ?

All your money is the limit, however you store it.

> there was a pretty low cap on how much you could bring with you at once,

you didnt need to bring a case of cash to buy anything before the 20th century

Currency was traditionally made of precious metals which often gave them a rather high starting point of value. It also made them inflation resistant meaning the real value only grew over time. For instance in the Roman Empire an aureus [1] was worth 25 denarii (prior to inflation) and was about 2cm in size, so roughly the same size as a dime, made of pure gold. And a denarius was worth about a day's wages. So you could comfortably hold decades of wages in a small coin purse. And as inflation ravaged the Empire a single aureus gradually came to be worth thousands of denarii.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus

This is what transit payment cards in Japan at least do, you can tap to pay most places but there’s a cap of 20k yen you can add to your card, so there’s a cap to how much you can lose.

I love how these cards work in Japan. There’s a bunch of different operators but they all work across the country – for example, if you buy a KITACA in Sapporo, you can use it in Tokyo and Osaka and anywhere else. And of course you can use them in a bunch of places, from all the transit options to vending machines and coin lockers on stations to konbini everywhere and even some restaurants.

(Of course it’s a bit more complicated: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICCard_Connection_en... – but still impressive nonetheless!)