This flies in the face of liberal democratic tradition. It effectively makes it mandatory to utilize a network, that bars any party not licensed by the government from acting as a node (the inter-bank network), for any significant economic exchange.
I suspect that by increasing the cost of law abidance, it will encourage defection from the formal economy and its democratically accountable judicial system.
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict you will never, ever be able to buy anything physical with Monero. Especially something over $10k or shipped over international lines.
edit: if you are claiming I am wrong, let's see a URL with a physical product available with payment in Monero
"The phrase “war on cash” suggests a parallel to the “war on drugs” and aptly so. In both wars, traditional civil liberties are shunted aside in the criminalization, surveillance, and prosecution of victimless private activities
... The war on cash might be more accurately labelled the “war on people who use cash.” What are suppressed by the above-listed tactics are not inanimate objects but people. Cash itself experiences no harms. People do. Coercive anti-cash policies abridge the freedom and reduce the welfare of peaceful individuals who prefer to use cash.
... The war on cash is being waged for the exclusive benefit of those who already wield an inordinate amount of power and control over the economy and the people that are struggling in it. And they want more. By slowly, quietly killing cash, they seek to seize the last remaining thing that offers people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives."
>The war on cash is being waged for the exclusive benefit of those who already wield an inordinate amount of power and control over the economy
Yup, this article tickled a deeply buried "sovereign citizen" type personality I didn't even know I had.
So without cash your options are write a check, which means you have to give your money to a bank, or use a credit card, which means you have to give your money to a bank.
Americans learned in 2008 exactly how much power banks have.
I'm reading a fantastic book right now titled "Walkaway." It takes place in a near-future where solar and hydrogen energy are robust and cost effective enough that, when combined with raw material feedstock, can be plugged into 3d printers to make pretty much anything you've got drawings for. Combined with an open source CAD community and UN refugee resources, it opens the opportunity for people to simply walk away from civilization, print up shelters, and build anarchist communities that refuse to even use popularity as a form of currency. It's a fun idea to chew over - post scarcity, why not just walk away?
Right, in the book they addressed this with middle-america/canada type land, and government-abandoned cities and towns in rural states. Basically, they were too remote to bother dealing with.
You will end up in some part of Greenland or Northern Canada. Not exactly the best arable land but you could live there if you really wanted. Your life would almost certainly be brutal and short. Also there are some shades of 'the noble savage' in your utopian view. It's all fun and games until someone breaks a leg, has to go to the dentist, gets pregnant, needs an appendectomy or would like to go to university. That's when it all comes crashing down and that evil society suddenly looks pretty good.
That said, I agree that banks have too much power.
Just to play along, the book deals with this. They aren't necessarily in unhabitable zones - although some are and basically convert to Mars colonies.
As for specialization, plenty of doctors "went Walkaway," and if you don't have a doctor present, you make do with a life video chat with a whole host of them as a local body performs whatever thing needs doing.
You're not gonna get brain surgery sure, but you can get a leg set.
These of course will have to be the least libertarian-adaptable environments; anywhere where survival is a collective endeavour and one idiot can ruin it for everyone will be extremely rule-bound. Look at the Arctic bases for an example.
Not the book's thesis - by the time the walkaways have started forming communities in harsh enough environments to require environmental suits to go outside, the only ones making their way to these communities are the "already indoctrinated."
Earlier in the book, we see what happens to "bad actors." For example, a meritocratic bad actor shows up as a newbie at a bed and breakfast that's at a popular crossroads. After hanging around for a bit, he starts trying to put up leaderboards tracking who's making the most code commits, who's taking out the most trash, who's cooking the most meals, that kind of thing. Other people don't like this because they have evidence of it causing other communities to go sour or outright disintegrate, so they revert his changes. Revert wars go down, huge discussion threads, think like the sort of stuff that caused that weird Node fork years ago. Anyway, he gets frustrated realizing nobody wants things his way, and leaves. He comes back months later with a little troop of like-minded people, uses force to take over the codebase of the Bed and Breakfast, puts up his leaderboards. Some of the original developers turn up, he says they're welcome in because of how much work they'd done. Instead, they pitch a tent outside, and say "tomorrow, we're going to head north, and build a new bed and breakfast up the road." By the morning, nearly the entire population has joined the original group, and the malcontents are abandoned once again. Hence the title of "walkaways."
Back to the original point - that very malcontent can be found in the mars-esque base of a poisonous city, but he's now indoctrinated to the walkaway culture. Having seen firsthand "the way," he doesn't "act up." The thesis is pulled from Japan - why is crime so low? Mostly culture, is the common answer.
As walkaways of this type don't exist right now, we can only hypothesize how it would actually go down, which is exactly what the author is doing, pulling from examples from hippie communes, communist groups, anarchist groups, wikis, the free software community, hacker groups, and for the converse, what the author calls "zotta-rich" and those living in "default," examples from banana republics, rampant corruption in plutocracies like Russia and the United States, copyright enforcement actions, etc.
It really is an interesting book, I highly recommend it.
> By my own (admittedly poor) math, it presents roughly ten thousand new, mind-bending and ground-breaking ideas per page. There are words in here that only otherwise exist in insular pockets of the maker/hacker/open source/thingiverse sub-sub-culture. In terms of its geek heroism, epic, generational scope and high stakes (only the survival of the human race, after all, and possibly the cure for death), the only literary comparison I can make is to Neal Stephenson's hard science disaster masterpiece, Seveneves, but Walkaway is more human. More squishy and close to home.
> It takes place in a near-future where solar and hydrogen energy are robust and cost effective enough (...)
As of now, each bit of solar/hydrogen/etc. energy technology requires raw materials mined from around the globe, processed in factories around the world, and assembled in some other corner of the world: the number of people that made it possible could easily add up to millions. And these people are doing it to make money: there's no incentive to make the technology suitable for someone who's planning to get lost in a forest and stop paying.
In short, I don't think these technology will allow you to "walk away" any more than an iPhone can.
Each new generation of tech requires a freedom/liberation myth to harness the energy of a new generation of humans, until the time comes to pull Tim Wu’s “master switch” and reboot onto a new substrate of emerging tech and youth.
This is totally inevitable everywhere and in fact cash itself will probably be gone by 2050. Make whatever principled claims you wish but I would almost bet money that 80%+ of cash purchases over $10k even today have something dodgy about where that money came from. You think governments don't know that? Their whole job is to prevent crime. This will make money laundering much harder and you know that. If the collateral damage is that lone couple of paranoid weirdos in each city who don't trust banks and actually store their savings under the mattress, well so be it.
The appropriate response to this is not to try to ban it in the name of "privacy" because the stats will overwhelmingly not be in your favour. The correct response is to demand and implement appropriate and ironclad data privacy laws which make it literally impossible for agencies to do whole-database searches, go on fishing trips, or other abuses of data collection tech. A police agency should not be able to query every name who made a large-amount purchase. However, they should be able to, given a name, see what purchases that person has made. This is a critical distinction.
Give up with the "the government should not be able to track my money flows!" argument. Might makes right, basically. Instead, focus your energy on legally constraining the use of that data to conform to principles of reasonable freedom and dignity. That is the only approach that will work, IMO.
I started reading this with strong disagreement but ended with complete agreement.
Which organizations (esp. in bay area) are most effectively advocating for data ethics (including freedom, dignity, privacy)?
EFF.org?
I am looking for organizations focused on a charter of rights and responsibilities for software providers, data processors, etc. We've been terrible at self-regulating as an industry, which is absolutely begging for onerous regulations.
Argentina is amidst a potential crisis right now, and one interesting concept I heard was that the only reason it hasnt exploded yet, is that millenials are not prepared to handle with bank runs. They haven't seen one yet and take attitudes that make it easy for the government to keep its overreach.
I cant speak for australia, but if in argentina they made purchases over 10k illegal, it would be impossible to buy property, as they are only made in cash.
Yes, lots if not most of money held in cash or similars has some stink, but its a stink made up by the government. I assure you tax evasion explains the vast majority of cash reserves and that is the reason why the government will always try to cruch on cash: to increase its revenues.
Privacy is not a legitimate defense, but government overreach is not a legitimate attack. Who would you rather win? They guy that avoided taxes or the government that already taxes 28% of GDP?
Nobody is denying that total government control over money flows will make it more difficult to launder black money.
Surely this is a benefit of abandoning cash. But there are also drawbacks:
- you are forced to pay fees for a bank account
- in most countries, banks require you to be registered at a home address to open an account
- not every government can be trusted with the control over your money. Think of Venezuela or Zimbabwe, for instance
Except there has been discussion relatively recently of negative interest. Charging you a percentage of your money to hold it. Having cash as an option acts as a hedge against this stupidity. You can't be so ridiculous that people would rather stuff it in a safe.
Country-specific. Lots of countries have banking with no fee for having the account, either as part of a competitive system or through the post office "giro" system.
> in most countries, banks require you to be registered at a home address to open an account
This is possibly the most serious objection to requiring people go through the banking system - it enforces an ID, and is used as a form of immigration control. Some systems have circular requirements where it's basically impossible to move there/get a job/get a bank account/rent a flat without having a local "fix" one or more of those for you.
I know it's a faux pas to complain about downvotes but I did not intend to endorse this system. I simply stated it as inevitable, and it is. Australia has a long history of implementing the "trial run" for G20 et al initiatives due to its combination of small size and being fairly well-organised.
Don't believe me? Go ask anyone in finance, especially AML. Of course it's inevitable. The end goal is the elimination of cash period.
And all this outrage is misplaced anyway. In advanced countries high denomination bills are tracked. It is the simplest thing in the world for an ATM to record the serials that pass through it. If you take out a large stack of 50s to buy a $20k (or hell, $5k) car "off the grid" then the system knows exactly how much you paid Joe's Discount Auto when Joe trundles his sack of bills down to the bank and it includes the bills you took out an hour ago. The idea that by you taking out of a bank, handing it to Joe, and him banking it somehow renders you invisible has not been true for at least a decade. If you try to avoid this you are - surprise - money laundering!
This is common knowledge and has even been used to nab bank robbers when they try to use the stolen bills. How do you think the bank knew which serials were taken and where they were spent?
Think I'm wrong? Go take out $10k of the highest domination you can, then drive all around town breaking them into smaller bills all in the same few days. Then go home and chill. Give it 2-3 days and you're gonna make some new friends.
Not their whole job; I am of the mindset that a major purpose of government is to ensure liberty by ensuring order. To put any other mandate over that one would introduce nothing but social engineering/tyranny.
Controlling access to scarce resources, enforcing rights of individuals against infringement by others, protecting life and property are the main points that pop into my mind. It is true that they enforce these actions by creating and punishing "crimes," but I think its important to not reduce it to just that. It's important to note that there are limits to what they can call a crime.
Even with your explanation I don't understand what you think the difference is. There's a list of rules, aka laws. Breaking them is termed a crime. Yes, they do try to reinforce social norms as well, like the orderly lining up for a bus - is that what you mean? If so that's a good point and you're right, I did over-simplify somewhat.
You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
Rules do not enforce themselves. Relying on institutions to enforce rules uncorrupted is very unreliable. The only thing that does work reliably is to avoid creating concentrations of power in the first place.
Essentially, you are proposing a benevolent dictator. If only we had a benevolent dictator, all our problems would be solved! Yeah, maybe. But we won't ever have one, and a malicious dictator is not a functional equivalent for a benevolent dictator, so we better stop building one.
> You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
Have you heard of a few little inventions called laws, police, and separation of powers? Because the things you have just declared impossible is quite common - we call it a "legal system".
I cannot believe I have to explain this. The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
Is it perfect? No. Is it better than anarchy? Yes.
> The only thing that does work reliably is to avoid creating concentrations of power in the first place.
This is what is impossible. Power concentrates like it's a law of nature. Government is utterly inevitable. And if you have a counterexample, please tell me and the rest of the world.
>> You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
> The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
You seem to have overlooked the word "total". That also has been tried, and no, it doesn't work.
Sure, we have to have a government. But stop giving it more power. It's got enough already.
You can not control power with laws. Do this thought experiment with me: Imagine you had a control panel where you could just make anyone do whatever you want. That is what power is, the ability to make other people do what you want. Now, how is a law going to help against your power? It can't. Even if you allowed someone to enact a law that forbade you from killing people (obviously, you could use your total power to prevent that in the first place): If you can in fact stop anyone from trying to enforce this law on you (and in this thought experiment, you obviously can), then the law is completely inconsequential.
Now, it still seems like there are laws that control power, doesn't it? Like, say, the US constitution. But imagine the same thought experiment, with the US consitution in place. The constitution would not in any way prevent you from doing whatever you want, would it?
So, how come that it still seems in the real world that the US constitution controls power? It's because noone has the de-facto power to ignore it, and there are many institutions and the will of the governed that work to keep it that way. That is how the constitution actually works: It works by a consensus of those who have power wanting to keep the power away from their opponents.
You are mixing up nominal power and de-facto power. Laws can describe nominal power structures. But if those who wield de-facto power don't agree, those laws are completely inconsequential. A law is only as good as the will of those with the de-facto power to enforce it.
This is why you can not control a tool that gives de-facto total power with laws: Those who wield it have no reason to care about laws. A law prescribing separation of powers is worthless if one entity has the de-facto power to ignore it. So, the separation of powers is not actually a result of the nominal power prescribed by law so much as it is a result of a system of governance with a huge number of participants each wielding a little bit of power and using that power to keep power away from others--where all those participants may well be inspired by the law to keep it that way, but the point is: If they stopped enforcing this balance of widely dispersed power on each other and allowed too much power to concentrate in one place, the way back can be hard.
Essentially, democracy is one huge exercise in keeping de-facto power from concentrating. Seriously, read the constitution of any free democracy. Read the universal declaration of human rights. The whole point is to put in hard work to counteract the natural tendency of power to concentrate, because of the bad experiences humanity has had with that.
Laws don't make things "literally impossible". They are just words on paper. Enforcement of those laws by people with guns might. Unfortunately, when the law breaker and the law enforcer are part of the same hierarchical structure (in the case of say the NSA tapping all internet traffic and the federal laws being enforced by the Department of Justice), the law breaking part of the organization can find a way to have the law enforcing part not enforce the law. Add the law making part to the hierarchy and one ends up with the law breaking part sometimes getting the laws it broke removed and pardons for past crimes. Like the FISA Amendments Act of 2008[1].
Australia did not every have a violent revolt against the ruling monarchy, but "We the people of the United States" strive for a government "of the people, by the people, for the people". A free people obey laws for the good of their neighbors and fellow citizens, not from fear of punishment from the state. Being able to ignore laws en-mass, when the people decide they are wrong, (like marijuana being illegal and a schedule I drug) is why cash needs to be available and not something that just criminals use.
I like to be informed when my arguments are based on false logic, but I'm not sure that fallacy would apply here. I take the ought of "We should have a Republic of free people" as given. The description of what is is why the parent's idea of creating laws to prevent the law enforcers from doing things is not always effective. Isn't the "Is–ought problem" that people describe what is to support what they think ought to be?
Yep - easy to have a visceral response to this change (how dare they cut down on my civil liberties!) but what sort of above board thing would you need to hand $10,000 over for?
The only real example I can think of is buying a car, and even then, that's not that likely, that you'll use cash.
Also how do you even get out $10,000? Most ATMs and banks have fairly low withdrawal limits.
Car dealerships often given huge discounts for cash purchases. So purchasing a car with cash is actually more likely than you give credit for.
As for getting out $10,000 you'd usually need to go into a teller with at least a couple of days notice to withdraw that kind of cash. It's easy to do, if not exactly the most convenient. Getting money out of a bank isn't restricted to ATMs or debit card use.
It's your money, the bank is just borrowing it from you to increase their spending power to increase their own profits and charging you for the benefit. It's a total coup: When you put money in your account, you're paying them for the privilege of lending them your money to so they can make further profits. You're still entitled to it back when you want it, in whatever forms the bank are capable of providing, up to and including cash.
Isn't paying "cash" for a car a just shorthand for "money up front, no credit cards or loans"? I don't personally know anyone who's taken $20,000 cash into a dealer for a car, they all pay by check which is still allowed:
> It means transactions over $10,000 will have to be made through an electronic payment system or cheque when purchasing goods or services.
In the USA, it's uncommon but not unheard of--people who don't have bank accounts, don't like paying taxes, don't want to pay their bank a fee for a cashier's check or wire, etc. It probably still gets reported to the government, though.
Pro tip: In a private transaction, do as much of the work as possible in the bank lobby. I sold a car, and the cash never left the bank--both I and the buyer had accounts at the same bank, so he withdrew and I deposited. The cash was just the cheapest way for us to do the transfer given the bank's fee structure. The physical handoff also synchronizes well with the physical handoff of the title/keys.
I believe the discount you speak of for paying cash is for paying up-front rather than deferring payment.
I did actually go to the bank and withdrew the ~$14,000 for my car, purchased second hand at a brand dealership (it had been traded in for a new car). It was quite an enjoyable experience, and very interesting how the bank measured bundles of ten $100 notes out by weight, with a rubber band of evidently consistent weight around each bundle. The man that handled finance at the dealership sighed, rolled his eyes and started counting. He said he only had someone pay in cash once every few months, if that, and normally for smaller amounts.
In addition to what others have said about "cash" not being literal in the context of car buying, I don't even think your statement is true. I've purchased several cars over the last few years, and every dealer I've worked with has offered me a discount if I financed the vehicle through them, because they get a kickback on the financing deal as long as you don't pay off the loan within a few months.
Lots of places give big discounts for paying in cash .. so they can evade the value added tax, and potentially hand the cash directly to employees evading tax there.
(I don't actually mind this much for small amounts for small businesses, but it does add up!)
There exists a legit and conditionally significant operational risk to not being paid in a timely manner. Waiting 30+ calendar days is commonplace in private business-to-business transactions...problem enough that US Federal law explicitly requires government agencies to include interest[1] on contractor payments made after 30 calendar days of proper invoice. Furthermore, if clearing time measured in days wasn't enough, the bank may even place a hold on a appreciable percentage for weeks without prior notice, and there's nothing you can do but wait it out; anecdotally, it's happened to me on at least one recent occasion with a large check issued by the Department of Treasury.
Late payment of invoices is a real problem for small businesses, yes. But the real distinction is upfront/arrears, not how it's settled! Someone can fail to pay an invoice in cash just as well as they can fail to pay it by cheque.
(I do think governments should try to heavily discourage long arrears and move to e.g. 7 days being the norm; invoices are a form of unsecured credit that can cause ripple collapses like any other form of credit.)
> It's your money, the bank is just borrowing it from you to increase their spending power to increase their own profits and charging you for the benefit.
That's a common misconception, but it really isn't true. The moment you hand it over for deposit it is their money.
Things I have transacted or had close friends transact for 4-5 figures in cash:
- Livestock
- Machine tools
- Firearms
- Farm equipment
- Computer equipment
Cash solves the problem of escrow very effectively (if someone tries to cheat you, you physically detain them and seize your cash, which is not possible if it's bits set god knows where), does not depend on rural internet connections, cannot be reversed after the fact, has minimal transaction costs, and has a universal protocol. If you're running, eg, a farm auction, cash is by far the best option.
> The only real example I can think of is buying a car, and even then, that's not that likely, that you'll use cash.
Consider foreclosure auctions, estate sales, contractor services, to name a few: all venues in which $10K+ transactions are quite common, and cash is a preferred--sometimes only--acceptable method of payment.
Just yesterday while securing the services of a flooring contractor, I was extended a 5% discount option if I paid in cash upon final completion; the alternative was a credit card payment online after being digitally invoiced. Not only would the contractor save on transaction fees, but the operational risk of not being paid and legal costs of following through with a construction lien can be quite painful, especially for small businesses.
so how many of you who is opppsing this has paid for or sold something in cash amount larger than 10k? Other than buying a used
vehicle I dont think regular people engage in large cash transactions. While tons of untaxed money changes hands between rich crooks to buy and sell valuable items bypassing any taxation or tracing. Before you start advocating for rich crooks, think again what is in it for you that you want to fight for it so bad
33 years ago... We used to use cash receipts from our convenience store to resupply at the cash and carry. It wasn’t uncommon. I saw transactions in high figures often from my fellow customers.
33 years ago cash may have been the fastest safest and easiest for of payment compared to today when there is so many fast, convenient and low fee payment options available. when a new legislation is passed the idea is to serve the needs of people 5-10 years from now, not 30 years ago.
Exactly. What business owner is going to entrust huge amounts of cash to staff if they don't have to, or aren't going through cash to keep it off the books?
as an owner of a small business that sells and buys from small businesses I can assure I never see any legitimate businesses offering to pay large amounts in cash or prefer to collect in cash.
Is this a bid by Credit Card companies to force everyone to pay them, or so that when you step out of line they can control you by controlling your access to resources?
Either way, impeding your ability to purchase things in any manner you (and your vendor or customer) see fit isn't okay by me.
It's to stop black markets. There are very few legitimate cash transactions over 10k as few people have that much in cash and cash transactions that big are very cumbersome.
I collect pinball machines and they are regularly over $10,000 for the highly-sought titles. Unlike a car which needs to be registered, they are "cash and carry" items and accepting any form of payment other than cash is risky (paypal? cheque? I think not).
It's like buying stuff at a garage sale with a credit card. Ridiculous.
"Transactions with financial institutions or consumer to consumer non-business transactions will not be affected" so my interpretation is that your use case doesn't apply but I'm not sure
Italy has a limit of 3,000 Euro for cash payments. There is a table with the limits since the early '90s at https://www.codiceazienda.it/limite-contanti-tabella-riepilo... (reference to the law, dd/mm/yyyy, limit.) The first one is in Liras, about 10k Euro.
My feeling is that it did little to achieve the desired result at least about money laundering. Apparently there are so many other ways to do that. For lawful expenses, checks (almost obsolete), bank transfers or credit cards are more convenient than getting cash at an ATM.
To be picky, and as specified in the link, it has now (since 2016) a 3,000 Euro limit for cash payments, it had (and it was "pure folly" in practice) a limit of only 1,000 Euro in 2012-2015.
JFYI, I remember that circa 2013 I had to make a particular payment to a Government Administration (only possible via the Post Office - Bollettino Postale) of around 1,200 Euro.
The Post Office wouldn't accept cash or a credit card, only a particular kind of cheque (Assegno Circolare) emitted directly from my bank.
Of course this check had to be printed and the bank software had a limited printing length field for the payee, which was an extremely long name.
The Post Office wouldn't accept any abbreviation/acronym, I went back and forth several times between bank and Post Office until finally a bank director came out with a key that allowed to print the cheque in a "condensed" font.
Aside from the "war on cash" angle covered in other comments, setting these types of limits to an arbitrary dollar amount is fundamentally unjust.
The CTR limit of $10K in the US is well known, but when it was introduced in the 70s[1] $10K was the equivalent of around $65K in today's money.
Similarly, inflation will guarantee if this is enacted Australians won't be able to buy something like a phone, fridge or a laptop in a few decades due to the relentless progress of inflation.
A few decades after that they won't be able to buy their groceries for $10K. These types of laws effectively outlaw cash entirely, they just have a time delay until they come into full effect.
Interestingly, governments also make money on cash existing; every moment's inflation that isn't realized by that cash is money in the government's pocket.
So, no more paying for things in Australia with more than $7500 USD? Brutal. Pretty soon it won't be legal to even pay your rent with cash.
As far as I know various $10,000 reporting laws started in the 1970s. That's more than $60,000 in today's money. Have these limits ever been adjusted for inflation in any country?
That's just the structuring detection: the limit is $10000 but most financial institutions have some form of check for structuring or smurfing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring). One payment under the limit probably won't trigger it, but multiple will. Every couple of years there is a story about some small business owner who draws the ire of some government agency because they make multiple deposits under 10k.
Making several smaller payments in order to sidestep reporting requirements is called "structuring" and, duh, is illegal. In other news: Grabbing another person's hand and using it to slap them in the face is actually still just you committing assault.
I think both the US and Australia (and probably other countries), should just do away with the $50 and $100 bills. It becomes a lot more inconvenient if you have to carry around 5 times as many briefcases of cash for illegal transactions.
If you're going to do illegal stuff, I don't think carrying around a lot cash if going to weigh too heavily on your mind. You're either going to carry it in a car or have a person carry it for you.
Physical currency is going away in our lifetimes. What it is replaced by (digital cash owned by governments, corporate scrip, independent decentralised currencies) is up for debate, but its demise is not.
Physical currency is controlled by governments, since it is expensive to produce and distribute, and network-connected payments are becoming more and more prevalent, it is inevitable that at some point the cost benefit ratio becomes untenable for governments and they remove this option.
If you fight for its existence against the government which claims sole jurisdiction over it in the first place, you're fighting yesterday's war, and doomed to lose, better instead to imagine a different future based on digital currencies (of whatever stripe). I'm not keen on bitcoin et al, but the future is clearly not in physical tokens which represent fixed denominations of currency.
If you were starting a currency today, would you start with cash?
Cash is the only way to keep one's spending private. (Anything else involves some kind of ID which, even if anonymous, can be traced back to you eventually.)
> Physical currency is going away in our lifetimes.
I don't think so. There are plenty of people that like to hoard their physical currency. There are plenty of people that don't trust "digital" currency (or other people having control of their money). I think it will be many decades before physical currency goes away - if it ever does.
Decades is within our lifetime for most of us, this change is accelerating quicker in some countries than others (I suspect the US is behind in this respect). Some countries in Europe are actively considering phasing out cash in the decades to come.
Hoarding physical currency for a sense of control is misguided; someone else controls the value of that physical money too, and there is a policy of inflation. It really is no different to digital currency in terms of control over value.
Buy gold or land if you want to hoard (which each have their own problems), and use barter if you want to escape detection.
How about publishing all government transactions, excluding salaries if we must.
If that works out well we can move on to publishing all transactions over a certain threshold (over a certain timeframe so you can't split the transactions). And publish all transactions that go to certain countries on black or grey lists.
Limiting cash transaction is a okay thing be there's much bigger fish to catch, if only politics meant it seriously.
My view might be biased as I live in Austria which is well-know for government subsidies and funding. And that includes gold handshakes to send 50 yr-olds into early retirement. WHY THE FUCK!?!
Anyways, my point being: Instead of outlawing big cash payments (hard to achieve in my eyes) the government has a lot of opportunities where it can show the transparency needed to re-establish trust from the plebs (sorry, citizens).
I'd see publishing public transactions as a first step and private ones as a second step. I mean, all we know about that dutch-irish sandwich is fairly limited, but if those transactions had been public early on some data scientist would have said "oh, that looks funny".
It's not just the "war on cash". This "PAYG" thing is screwing over taxpayers. They could otherwise invest that money, make a return, then divest before the end of the year, earning a small profit. This robs them of that right so the government can instead. Disgusting.
Credit is honestly cheap enough that, if you really wanted to invest money that is a liability from the second you earn it, you could.
All other things being equal, if the government earns the money upfront instead of having to wait, tax rates can decrease slightly for the same amount of income. I live in a PAYG country, and given higher rates of tax-default and tax-stress in non-PAYG countries, I prefer PAYG.
Some while back a bank ceo floated the idea of negative interest rates for consumer deposits. Not negative as in less than inflation but literally negative.
If banks are allowed to kill the utility of transacting business with cash I would fully expect the amount of money sucked out of the economy by the banking sector to increase in fees to hold and transfer money.
Cash transaction are a hard break on how asinine you can be without your customers deciding to do business with nobody.
> Don't the bankers know that this will only make cryptocurrency more attractive to those who want privacy?
Yes they do, that's why they've become so heavily invested in it over the past few years. They can force onto normal people these absurd limits on the use cash, while controlling the most viable alternate transaction method.
So, people in both legal and illicit businesses need the bankers.
Any push for eliminating cash is just another version of the nonsensical "if you have nothing to hide..." argument all over again to curb freedoms.
> If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system. [1]
For those who are arguing about an inevitable future where cash won't exist, I'll just say that people will find other ways to transact (like barter, cryptocurrency, shadow currencies). And those will be for legal purposes and illegal purposes, depending on the people and the situation. Blanket assumptions of crime and illegal activities with cash are extremely naïve.
The problems with this go a lot deeper than most people realize, but I can't summarize them here. I strongly recommend reading the following paper to understand the importance of cash:
Abstract:
"This paper first provides a detailed outline of how the present money system works. This then serves as a backdrop to discuss a number of orthodox fallacies and heterodox flaws in money theory, followed by a summary of the dysfunctions of split-circuit reserve banking and a brief outlook on the perspective of a single-circuit sovereign money system."
112 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadI suspect that by increasing the cost of law abidance, it will encourage defection from the formal economy and its democratically accountable judicial system.
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict you will never, ever be able to buy anything physical with Monero. Especially something over $10k or shipped over international lines.
edit: if you are claiming I am wrong, let's see a URL with a physical product available with payment in Monero
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/26/tech/innovation/dogecoin-...
"The phrase “war on cash” suggests a parallel to the “war on drugs” and aptly so. In both wars, traditional civil liberties are shunted aside in the criminalization, surveillance, and prosecution of victimless private activities
... The war on cash might be more accurately labelled the “war on people who use cash.” What are suppressed by the above-listed tactics are not inanimate objects but people. Cash itself experiences no harms. People do. Coercive anti-cash policies abridge the freedom and reduce the welfare of peaceful individuals who prefer to use cash.
... The war on cash is being waged for the exclusive benefit of those who already wield an inordinate amount of power and control over the economy and the people that are struggling in it. And they want more. By slowly, quietly killing cash, they seek to seize the last remaining thing that offers people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives."
Yup, this article tickled a deeply buried "sovereign citizen" type personality I didn't even know I had.
So without cash your options are write a check, which means you have to give your money to a bank, or use a credit card, which means you have to give your money to a bank.
Americans learned in 2008 exactly how much power banks have.
I'm reading a fantastic book right now titled "Walkaway." It takes place in a near-future where solar and hydrogen energy are robust and cost effective enough that, when combined with raw material feedstock, can be plugged into 3d printers to make pretty much anything you've got drawings for. Combined with an open source CAD community and UN refugee resources, it opens the opportunity for people to simply walk away from civilization, print up shelters, and build anarchist communities that refuse to even use popularity as a form of currency. It's a fun idea to chew over - post scarcity, why not just walk away?
There's no unowned land to walk into.
That said, I agree that banks have too much power.
As for specialization, plenty of doctors "went Walkaway," and if you don't have a doctor present, you make do with a life video chat with a whole host of them as a local body performs whatever thing needs doing.
You're not gonna get brain surgery sure, but you can get a leg set.
These of course will have to be the least libertarian-adaptable environments; anywhere where survival is a collective endeavour and one idiot can ruin it for everyone will be extremely rule-bound. Look at the Arctic bases for an example.
Earlier in the book, we see what happens to "bad actors." For example, a meritocratic bad actor shows up as a newbie at a bed and breakfast that's at a popular crossroads. After hanging around for a bit, he starts trying to put up leaderboards tracking who's making the most code commits, who's taking out the most trash, who's cooking the most meals, that kind of thing. Other people don't like this because they have evidence of it causing other communities to go sour or outright disintegrate, so they revert his changes. Revert wars go down, huge discussion threads, think like the sort of stuff that caused that weird Node fork years ago. Anyway, he gets frustrated realizing nobody wants things his way, and leaves. He comes back months later with a little troop of like-minded people, uses force to take over the codebase of the Bed and Breakfast, puts up his leaderboards. Some of the original developers turn up, he says they're welcome in because of how much work they'd done. Instead, they pitch a tent outside, and say "tomorrow, we're going to head north, and build a new bed and breakfast up the road." By the morning, nearly the entire population has joined the original group, and the malcontents are abandoned once again. Hence the title of "walkaways."
Back to the original point - that very malcontent can be found in the mars-esque base of a poisonous city, but he's now indoctrinated to the walkaway culture. Having seen firsthand "the way," he doesn't "act up." The thesis is pulled from Japan - why is crime so low? Mostly culture, is the common answer.
As walkaways of this type don't exist right now, we can only hypothesize how it would actually go down, which is exactly what the author is doing, pulling from examples from hippie communes, communist groups, anarchist groups, wikis, the free software community, hacker groups, and for the converse, what the author calls "zotta-rich" and those living in "default," examples from banana republics, rampant corruption in plutocracies like Russia and the United States, copyright enforcement actions, etc.
It really is an interesting book, I highly recommend it.
> By my own (admittedly poor) math, it presents roughly ten thousand new, mind-bending and ground-breaking ideas per page. There are words in here that only otherwise exist in insular pockets of the maker/hacker/open source/thingiverse sub-sub-culture. In terms of its geek heroism, epic, generational scope and high stakes (only the survival of the human race, after all, and possibly the cure for death), the only literary comparison I can make is to Neal Stephenson's hard science disaster masterpiece, Seveneves, but Walkaway is more human. More squishy and close to home.
As of now, each bit of solar/hydrogen/etc. energy technology requires raw materials mined from around the globe, processed in factories around the world, and assembled in some other corner of the world: the number of people that made it possible could easily add up to millions. And these people are doing it to make money: there's no incentive to make the technology suitable for someone who's planning to get lost in a forest and stop paying.
In short, I don't think these technology will allow you to "walk away" any more than an iPhone can.
But as soon as the technology exists... There's no reason to horde it.
So if you want to sell your house, and someone else wants to pay for it in cash, then you're all fine.
The appropriate response to this is not to try to ban it in the name of "privacy" because the stats will overwhelmingly not be in your favour. The correct response is to demand and implement appropriate and ironclad data privacy laws which make it literally impossible for agencies to do whole-database searches, go on fishing trips, or other abuses of data collection tech. A police agency should not be able to query every name who made a large-amount purchase. However, they should be able to, given a name, see what purchases that person has made. This is a critical distinction.
Give up with the "the government should not be able to track my money flows!" argument. Might makes right, basically. Instead, focus your energy on legally constraining the use of that data to conform to principles of reasonable freedom and dignity. That is the only approach that will work, IMO.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
Which organizations (esp. in bay area) are most effectively advocating for data ethics (including freedom, dignity, privacy)?
EFF.org?
I am looking for organizations focused on a charter of rights and responsibilities for software providers, data processors, etc. We've been terrible at self-regulating as an industry, which is absolutely begging for onerous regulations.
I cant speak for australia, but if in argentina they made purchases over 10k illegal, it would be impossible to buy property, as they are only made in cash.
Yes, lots if not most of money held in cash or similars has some stink, but its a stink made up by the government. I assure you tax evasion explains the vast majority of cash reserves and that is the reason why the government will always try to cruch on cash: to increase its revenues.
Privacy is not a legitimate defense, but government overreach is not a legitimate attack. Who would you rather win? They guy that avoided taxes or the government that already taxes 28% of GDP?
- you are forced to pay fees for a bank account
- in most countries, banks require you to be registered at a home address to open an account
- not every government can be trusted with the control over your money. Think of Venezuela or Zimbabwe, for instance
Yet, holding cash will similarly erode your value due to inflation, which is a designed-in feature of fiat currency and central banking.
Also, fees generally go away with sizeable accounts and interest can be earned.
Anonymity, however, is gone for sure with Know Your Customer laws
I don't know why you would have selected those countries. I would not trust any government with complete control over my money.
Or Brazil, where the government suddenly froze everybody's bank accounts in the early 90s (Confisco da Poupança). An article about it (in Portuguese): http://radioagencianacional.ebc.com.br/geral/audio/2016-03/h... and on Wikipedia: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Collor_de_Mello#Confi...
Country-specific. Lots of countries have banking with no fee for having the account, either as part of a competitive system or through the post office "giro" system.
> in most countries, banks require you to be registered at a home address to open an account
This is possibly the most serious objection to requiring people go through the banking system - it enforces an ID, and is used as a form of immigration control. Some systems have circular requirements where it's basically impossible to move there/get a job/get a bank account/rent a flat without having a local "fix" one or more of those for you.
Don't believe me? Go ask anyone in finance, especially AML. Of course it's inevitable. The end goal is the elimination of cash period.
And all this outrage is misplaced anyway. In advanced countries high denomination bills are tracked. It is the simplest thing in the world for an ATM to record the serials that pass through it. If you take out a large stack of 50s to buy a $20k (or hell, $5k) car "off the grid" then the system knows exactly how much you paid Joe's Discount Auto when Joe trundles his sack of bills down to the bank and it includes the bills you took out an hour ago. The idea that by you taking out of a bank, handing it to Joe, and him banking it somehow renders you invisible has not been true for at least a decade. If you try to avoid this you are - surprise - money laundering!
This is common knowledge and has even been used to nab bank robbers when they try to use the stolen bills. How do you think the bank knew which serials were taken and where they were spent?
Think I'm wrong? Go take out $10k of the highest domination you can, then drive all around town breaking them into smaller bills all in the same few days. Then go home and chill. Give it 2-3 days and you're gonna make some new friends.
Not their whole job; I am of the mindset that a major purpose of government is to ensure liberty by ensuring order. To put any other mandate over that one would introduce nothing but social engineering/tyranny.
It sounds like the double negative and the double positive of the same thing.
You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
Rules do not enforce themselves. Relying on institutions to enforce rules uncorrupted is very unreliable. The only thing that does work reliably is to avoid creating concentrations of power in the first place.
Essentially, you are proposing a benevolent dictator. If only we had a benevolent dictator, all our problems would be solved! Yeah, maybe. But we won't ever have one, and a malicious dictator is not a functional equivalent for a benevolent dictator, so we better stop building one.
Have you heard of a few little inventions called laws, police, and separation of powers? Because the things you have just declared impossible is quite common - we call it a "legal system".
I cannot believe I have to explain this. The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
Is it perfect? No. Is it better than anarchy? Yes.
> The only thing that does work reliably is to avoid creating concentrations of power in the first place.
This is what is impossible. Power concentrates like it's a law of nature. Government is utterly inevitable. And if you have a counterexample, please tell me and the rest of the world.
> The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
You seem to have overlooked the word "total". That also has been tried, and no, it doesn't work.
Sure, we have to have a government. But stop giving it more power. It's got enough already.
You can not control power with laws. Do this thought experiment with me: Imagine you had a control panel where you could just make anyone do whatever you want. That is what power is, the ability to make other people do what you want. Now, how is a law going to help against your power? It can't. Even if you allowed someone to enact a law that forbade you from killing people (obviously, you could use your total power to prevent that in the first place): If you can in fact stop anyone from trying to enforce this law on you (and in this thought experiment, you obviously can), then the law is completely inconsequential.
Now, it still seems like there are laws that control power, doesn't it? Like, say, the US constitution. But imagine the same thought experiment, with the US consitution in place. The constitution would not in any way prevent you from doing whatever you want, would it?
So, how come that it still seems in the real world that the US constitution controls power? It's because noone has the de-facto power to ignore it, and there are many institutions and the will of the governed that work to keep it that way. That is how the constitution actually works: It works by a consensus of those who have power wanting to keep the power away from their opponents.
You are mixing up nominal power and de-facto power. Laws can describe nominal power structures. But if those who wield de-facto power don't agree, those laws are completely inconsequential. A law is only as good as the will of those with the de-facto power to enforce it.
This is why you can not control a tool that gives de-facto total power with laws: Those who wield it have no reason to care about laws. A law prescribing separation of powers is worthless if one entity has the de-facto power to ignore it. So, the separation of powers is not actually a result of the nominal power prescribed by law so much as it is a result of a system of governance with a huge number of participants each wielding a little bit of power and using that power to keep power away from others--where all those participants may well be inspired by the law to keep it that way, but the point is: If they stopped enforcing this balance of widely dispersed power on each other and allowed too much power to concentrate in one place, the way back can be hard.
Essentially, democracy is one huge exercise in keeping de-facto power from concentrating. Seriously, read the constitution of any free democracy. Read the universal declaration of human rights. The whole point is to put in hard work to counteract the natural tendency of power to concentrate, because of the bad experiences humanity has had with that.
Australia did not every have a violent revolt against the ruling monarchy, but "We the people of the United States" strive for a government "of the people, by the people, for the people". A free people obey laws for the good of their neighbors and fellow citizens, not from fear of punishment from the state. Being able to ignore laws en-mass, when the people decide they are wrong, (like marijuana being illegal and a schedule I drug) is why cash needs to be available and not something that just criminals use.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
- how many purely above board transactions of this value are there to be affected by this?
- if people are to insist on financial anonymity, how is the tax burden to be distributed fairly?
The only real example I can think of is buying a car, and even then, that's not that likely, that you'll use cash.
Also how do you even get out $10,000? Most ATMs and banks have fairly low withdrawal limits.
As for getting out $10,000 you'd usually need to go into a teller with at least a couple of days notice to withdraw that kind of cash. It's easy to do, if not exactly the most convenient. Getting money out of a bank isn't restricted to ATMs or debit card use.
It's your money, the bank is just borrowing it from you to increase their spending power to increase their own profits and charging you for the benefit. It's a total coup: When you put money in your account, you're paying them for the privilege of lending them your money to so they can make further profits. You're still entitled to it back when you want it, in whatever forms the bank are capable of providing, up to and including cash.
> It means transactions over $10,000 will have to be made through an electronic payment system or cheque when purchasing goods or services.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Pro tip: In a private transaction, do as much of the work as possible in the bank lobby. I sold a car, and the cash never left the bank--both I and the buyer had accounts at the same bank, so he withdrew and I deposited. The cash was just the cheapest way for us to do the transfer given the bank's fee structure. The physical handoff also synchronizes well with the physical handoff of the title/keys.
I did actually go to the bank and withdrew the ~$14,000 for my car, purchased second hand at a brand dealership (it had been traded in for a new car). It was quite an enjoyable experience, and very interesting how the bank measured bundles of ten $100 notes out by weight, with a rubber band of evidently consistent weight around each bundle. The man that handled finance at the dealership sighed, rolled his eyes and started counting. He said he only had someone pay in cash once every few months, if that, and normally for smaller amounts.
(I don't actually mind this much for small amounts for small businesses, but it does add up!)
Bit of an oxymoron, but point well taken.
There exists a legit and conditionally significant operational risk to not being paid in a timely manner. Waiting 30+ calendar days is commonplace in private business-to-business transactions...problem enough that US Federal law explicitly requires government agencies to include interest[1] on contractor payments made after 30 calendar days of proper invoice. Furthermore, if clearing time measured in days wasn't enough, the bank may even place a hold on a appreciable percentage for weeks without prior notice, and there's nothing you can do but wait it out; anecdotally, it's happened to me on at least one recent occasion with a large check issued by the Department of Treasury.
[1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsservices/gov/pmt/promptPay...
(I do think governments should try to heavily discourage long arrears and move to e.g. 7 days being the norm; invoices are a form of unsecured credit that can cause ripple collapses like any other form of credit.)
That's a common misconception, but it really isn't true. The moment you hand it over for deposit it is their money.
- Livestock
- Machine tools
- Firearms
- Farm equipment
- Computer equipment
Cash solves the problem of escrow very effectively (if someone tries to cheat you, you physically detain them and seize your cash, which is not possible if it's bits set god knows where), does not depend on rural internet connections, cannot be reversed after the fact, has minimal transaction costs, and has a universal protocol. If you're running, eg, a farm auction, cash is by far the best option.
Argument from personally circumscribed imagination. Not really an argument at all.
Consider foreclosure auctions, estate sales, contractor services, to name a few: all venues in which $10K+ transactions are quite common, and cash is a preferred--sometimes only--acceptable method of payment.
Just yesterday while securing the services of a flooring contractor, I was extended a 5% discount option if I paid in cash upon final completion; the alternative was a credit card payment online after being digitally invoiced. Not only would the contractor save on transaction fees, but the operational risk of not being paid and legal costs of following through with a construction lien can be quite painful, especially for small businesses.
Not sure how common it is now.
Instead, think of small businesses. They regularly have the opportunity to have large transactions. Vehicles, livestock, capital equipment.
Either way, impeding your ability to purchase things in any manner you (and your vendor or customer) see fit isn't okay by me.
It's like buying stuff at a garage sale with a credit card. Ridiculous.
There is a slope and it's very slippery.
My feeling is that it did little to achieve the desired result at least about money laundering. Apparently there are so many other ways to do that. For lawful expenses, checks (almost obsolete), bank transfers or credit cards are more convenient than getting cash at an ATM.
JFYI, I remember that circa 2013 I had to make a particular payment to a Government Administration (only possible via the Post Office - Bollettino Postale) of around 1,200 Euro.
The Post Office wouldn't accept cash or a credit card, only a particular kind of cheque (Assegno Circolare) emitted directly from my bank.
Of course this check had to be printed and the bank software had a limited printing length field for the payee, which was an extremely long name.
The Post Office wouldn't accept any abbreviation/acronym, I went back and forth several times between bank and Post Office until finally a bank director came out with a key that allowed to print the cheque in a "condensed" font.
The CTR limit of $10K in the US is well known, but when it was introduced in the 70s[1] $10K was the equivalent of around $65K in today's money.
Similarly, inflation will guarantee if this is enacted Australians won't be able to buy something like a phone, fridge or a laptop in a few decades due to the relentless progress of inflation.
A few decades after that they won't be able to buy their groceries for $10K. These types of laws effectively outlaw cash entirely, they just have a time delay until they come into full effect.
1. https://repositorio.comillas.edu/rest/bitstreams/38908/retri...
As far as I know various $10,000 reporting laws started in the 1970s. That's more than $60,000 in today's money. Have these limits ever been adjusted for inflation in any country?
Physical currency is controlled by governments, since it is expensive to produce and distribute, and network-connected payments are becoming more and more prevalent, it is inevitable that at some point the cost benefit ratio becomes untenable for governments and they remove this option.
If you fight for its existence against the government which claims sole jurisdiction over it in the first place, you're fighting yesterday's war, and doomed to lose, better instead to imagine a different future based on digital currencies (of whatever stripe). I'm not keen on bitcoin et al, but the future is clearly not in physical tokens which represent fixed denominations of currency.
If you were starting a currency today, would you start with cash?
I don't think so. There are plenty of people that like to hoard their physical currency. There are plenty of people that don't trust "digital" currency (or other people having control of their money). I think it will be many decades before physical currency goes away - if it ever does.
Hoarding physical currency for a sense of control is misguided; someone else controls the value of that physical money too, and there is a policy of inflation. It really is no different to digital currency in terms of control over value.
Buy gold or land if you want to hoard (which each have their own problems), and use barter if you want to escape detection.
If that works out well we can move on to publishing all transactions over a certain threshold (over a certain timeframe so you can't split the transactions). And publish all transactions that go to certain countries on black or grey lists.
Limiting cash transaction is a okay thing be there's much bigger fish to catch, if only politics meant it seriously.
Salaries are the most important transaction to monitor as they represent a recurring expense and easily become inflated in the government sector.
Tax payers have a right to know what they pay for and how much it costs. What reason are you using to justify publishing private transactions?
My view might be biased as I live in Austria which is well-know for government subsidies and funding. And that includes gold handshakes to send 50 yr-olds into early retirement. WHY THE FUCK!?!
Anyways, my point being: Instead of outlawing big cash payments (hard to achieve in my eyes) the government has a lot of opportunities where it can show the transparency needed to re-establish trust from the plebs (sorry, citizens).
I'd see publishing public transactions as a first step and private ones as a second step. I mean, all we know about that dutch-irish sandwich is fairly limited, but if those transactions had been public early on some data scientist would have said "oh, that looks funny".
All other things being equal, if the government earns the money upfront instead of having to wait, tax rates can decrease slightly for the same amount of income. I live in a PAYG country, and given higher rates of tax-default and tax-stress in non-PAYG countries, I prefer PAYG.
If banks are allowed to kill the utility of transacting business with cash I would fully expect the amount of money sucked out of the economy by the banking sector to increase in fees to hold and transfer money.
Cash transaction are a hard break on how asinine you can be without your customers deciding to do business with nobody.
Don't the bankers know that this will only make cryptocurrency more attractive to those who want privacy?
Yes they do, that's why they've become so heavily invested in it over the past few years. They can force onto normal people these absurd limits on the use cash, while controlling the most viable alternate transaction method.
So, people in both legal and illicit businesses need the bankers.
People doing illegal transactions will just use a substitute.
> If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system. [1]
For those who are arguing about an inevitable future where cash won't exist, I'll just say that people will find other ways to transact (like barter, cryptocurrency, shadow currencies). And those will be for legal purposes and illegal purposes, depending on the people and the situation. Blanket assumptions of crime and illegal activities with cash are extremely naïve.
[1]: https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue80/Huber80.pdf Huber, Joseph - Split-circuit reserve banking - functioning, dysfunctions and future perspectives
Abstract: "This paper first provides a detailed outline of how the present money system works. This then serves as a backdrop to discuss a number of orthodox fallacies and heterodox flaws in money theory, followed by a summary of the dysfunctions of split-circuit reserve banking and a brief outlook on the perspective of a single-circuit sovereign money system."
Keywords: monetary economics, money theory, credit creation, banking theory, fractional reserve banking, monetary policy, monetary reform
One may find comments on the paper here: https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-80/