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This article is ridiculously biased. The actual reason the EU reps want to phase out the 500€ bill is that according to the latest data, over 90% of those bills are used for criminal activity. Can't look up references well as I'm on the phone, but you read that right: only 10% of the bills are used by regular people. All the rest of it is used by crime syndicates because the larger the bill, the easier it is to move illegal money.

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So logically if they phase out the largest note the drug dealers income stream doesn't get any smaller its just moved around in a lot more smaller increment and now you can logically say that some huge percentage of the new largest note is now used by criminals.

At what point do you stop to realize that you aren't doing anything useful to combat crime?

Eliminating the 500 EUR would leave the 200 EUR in circulation. Assuming the criminals shift to using that, they'll see a modest 2.5x increase in volume to transport. Somehow I doubt that would be a show stopper.

Clearly we should replace Euro notes with Rai Stones[1] :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

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