Chaum's systems also failed because of a lack of demand. In the early-to-mid-90s it seemed sensible that nobody would spend money online without at least some of the security guarantees of digital cash. In retrospect, however, there are these issues:
1. Banks have centuries of experience in combating fraud. It is not clear that digital cash actually improves the situation for banks, given the higher infrastructure costs. If you cannot show banks that they will lose less to fraud with digital cash than the new infrastructure would cost, the banks will not care -- it is easier to analyze spending patterns and identify likely fraud.
2. Most users have a very poor understanding of the security implications of spending money online. On some of that, the fraud that users have to deal with is only partially defended against by digital cash; scams involving people taking money and not delivering the goods are even older than the banking system and are not addressed by digital cash. While the theft of credit card data causes headaches for users, banks are sufficiently good at stopping it that few people are clamoring for a better system.
3. It is unclear that merchants would have benefited from digital cash. While certain kinds of fraud affecting merchants might have been mitigated (e.g. no charge backs), the real issue is whether or not merchants would make more money with such systems. That is unclear, as the banks can and mostly certainly would still charge fees for the service and would likely charge at least as much as they charge for credit cards. Offline systems would mitigate the issue of service fees, but would also increase the risk of fraud and would leave merchants with the short end of the stick.
If anything, Bitcoin reinforces the point that security is not the deciding factor here. Bitcoin does not even have a clear security definition, yet for reasons that we could argue about for hours on end it has become more popular than systems with provable security.