Fixed your fix.
Anyone who still values the old-fashioned concept of “anonymity” should be the most worried about a ban on cash.
Can anyone enumerate one thing that they’ve ever bought for $7,500+ that they would only want to do with cash?
How will it hamper [legal] business? It will make all business transparent to tax agencies (which is a good thing)-- people who are paying their taxes won’t be subsidizing those who do not.
Cashier’s check. If you’re even more paranoid, you can call the bank itself to verify.
Your argument is valid – for a different thread-- but extraneous in this thread.
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How much is an acceptable amount of cash for a poor person to have, then ?
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Transitions are always painful and never perfect, but this is a step in the right direction. Transparency of transactions (and ideally of ownership) help the disenfranchised, rather than hurting them, as it is the lack of records that allows people to be exploited and expropriated by those with power.
Besides, anonymity is for situations involving private concerns parties, provided all are voluntarily involved. Money, on the other hand, is public infrastructure and a social promise to eventually be given a real asset in exchange for a token.
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Colloquially known as ‘Bin Ladens’.
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Maybe this will lead to an upturn in the use of Lego as an off the grid currency.
I guess that what governments would really like would be an unanonymized bit-chain, so they could track all transactions (though, no doubt, there would be exemptions for politicians, their families, staff and cronies).
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My grandpa used to pay cash for big things, the reasoning is that cash is king, immediate and tangible.
Pay cash for a new car and you can negotiate a better price. No need for cheques or multiple levels of paperwork.
I’m sure a mom & pop operation would rather be paid full value in cash rather than suffer merchant’s % cut off credit card transactions.
Everyone in the chain wants their cut.
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Selling a car to someone. Basically any transaction where you don’t trust any sort of check and a credit card isn’t viable.
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How else would you do it?
That is what a cashiers check is for.
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Blockchains are already being de-anonymized making every transaction traceable and permanently recorded.
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I’ve bought and sold used cars in cash a few times. Many (most?) people wouldn’t want to trust personal checks from strangers for such transactions. Obviously there are other ways to do it (that usually involve fees) but cash worked well for me.
Oddly enough, my last cash transaction for a used car was when I sold my ‘65 Ford Mustang to an Australian for $7500 and he paid cash.
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personal checks
I think there’s your problem. You live somewhere with an old fashioned banking system and use that as your reference when considering the effect of the Aussie reforms. To my knowledge, most of the rich world doesn’t use checks anymore, actually there are several poor countries who doesn’t either, the Kenyan MPesa system for example.
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Like I said, there are obviously other options. But can you name any that don’t involve any transaction costs? (Maybe there are some! I honestly don’t know)
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Ah, fair enough, I missed out on your nuance.
But yeah, I could easily imagine that in some countries there are, or will be, fees added to cash withdrawals and payments by check as well.
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So, because some people commit crimes, you think we should all be subject to even less freedom?
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It’s hard for me to say what the privacy hit is worth, because I’m not quite sure what the implications of the privacy hit would be. This is part of a move to a cashless economy, which means full tracking of your every purchase - ripe for private data mining and government tracking - impacting decisions about your life (e.g. health and life insurance)… Any vestige of privacy would be totally gone. If it’s limited to purchases over $10K (but why stop there? many countries aren’t), it wouldn’t have that much of an impact on privacy - but also not much of an impact on crime, either, as pointed out.
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That is pretty much the way the system works.
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Another step in the proud authoritarian tradition of fucking over ordinary people with ill-conceived ineffective legislation that any actual criminal can find their way around within ten seconds.
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Today’s lawmakers can’t be bothered to demand law enforcement do their job of going after real criminals. Easier just to treat everyone like a criminal. /s
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