Hacker News Reader

I think it comes down to scale & other means of controlling illegal activity. They don’t need to ban changing $20 bills if they’re fairly comfortable that e.g. banks are going to ask questions if you show up with a suitcase full of them.

Scale also matters because it’s hard to ramp up businesses: the mafia can’t claim that their restaurant is doing $100M/year in sales so there are going to be more people involved (i.e. chances for the police to find an in) and they can focus on businesses which do tons of anonymous transactions.

I imagine it is very hard to launder, say, $320 M (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-worm...) in cash. Google says that a $20 bill weighs about 1 gram, so 320 M / 20 = 16,000 kg or ~3.5k lbs. About the weight of a car.

> I feel like there are people in all governments who are thinking all day every day "Yes, and we are working on this insane hole in our control as hard as we can and the day is coming close when we can finally outlaw cash."

From what I can tell, this is what "Central Bank Digital Currencies" are all about.