Banning cash transaction - where is it going?

[anu]

A number of countries have banned cash transaction exceeding a certain limit, with more to follow. For now the average citizen won't usually reach this limit, maybe with the exception of trading a car from private to private. But the limits have been tightened in some countries already and it looks like the limits might be approaching zero at some point - doing away with cash entirely.

An incomplete list:
India: IRS 20,000 (~EUR 300)
Greece: EUR 1,500
Italy: EUR 1,000 - previously 2,500
Belgium: EUR 5,000 - 3,000 from 2014 on
Spain: EUR 2,500 (if one party is self employed)
Mexico: MXN 100,000 (~EUR 5,000)

Obviously, all the EMU countries in the list are those with budget problems, high tax fraud and high crime rates. Moving to a cashless society will "prove" to the world how detrimental anonymous payment is to society. Most will agree that we should trade some freedom for the security of drying up most sources of crime: cash. We have nothing to hide after all, do we?

The IMF tells us that 2-5% of the world wide economy involves money laundering. As most money laundering involves cash, a large part of cash transactions (up to half of them) would be illegitimate. What are we to make out of that?


IMO, a lot of well intentioned people are bent to driving us down the way to totalitarianism by making us totally dependent on the cooperation of the government for doing even such trivial things as buying a bagel and putting us under constant surveillance. If you ever loose this goodwill in a proprietary cashless society, you are done for. Bitcoin is one of the very few roadblocks on this way. If the governments around the world are serious with the "cashless society", they must dispose of Bitcoin at all cost, because Bitcoin shares too many properties with cash.