Australian government proposes to limit cash payments for purchases to AUD$10K
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&#x27;t know that? Their whole job is to prevent crime. This will make money laundering much harder and <i>you know that</i>. If the collateral damage is that lone couple of paranoid weirdos in each city who don&#x27;t trust banks and actually store their savings under the mattress, well so be it.<p>The appropriate response to this is not to try to ban it in the name of &quot;privacy&quot; 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 <i>critical</i> distinction.<p>Give up with the &quot;the government should not be able to track my money flows!&quot; 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.