https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/05/australia-bans-cash-for-all-purchases-ove... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/08/australia-federal-bud... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/8j4i88/australia_bans_cash_for_all... https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8j2y1a/australia_bans_cash_for_a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047178 https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/springsummer-2018/curse-war-cash And cryptocurrency demand jumps on the news. "The government says it's "encouraging the transition to a [censorable, controllable, enslaved] digital society" and cracking down on tax evasion [to fund more murder, slavery, fatcats, more shit the people don't want, etc]." Also, that banks remain in the loop. Consider that next year 10K will buy less and so on. Eventually a loaf of bread will cost $10,000... and then ... youre done. So, no more paying for things in Australia with more than $7500 USD? Brutal. Pretty soon it won't be legal to even pay your rent with cash. The government will enforce the measure by allocating roughly $300 million for what it calls the Black Economy Standing Taskforce. The goal is to drum up about $3 billion in new tax revenue over the next four years. One of the biggest targets for the new task force will be the illicit tobacco trade. Australia has the highest tax on cigarettes in the world, with an average pack costing about $40. But there's a huge black market for cigarettes, which comes from both stolen goods and smuggling from outside the country. Taxes aren't paid on cigarettes until the point of sale, so theft from tobacco warehouses is unusually common in Australia. anyone with their eyes open can see where this is going. We should expect governments to move away from cash over the next decade, just as currency anarchists continue to insist that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are the real future. Researchers in the 1970s predicted that a widespread debit card system would be the perfect surveillance tool. And they weren't exactly wrong. What they didn't predict was what happens when a completely digital economy gets hacked. Equifax's recent loss of so much personal data on virtually half of all Americans ... just a prelude to many more snafus to come. You can not control power with laws. Do this thought experiment with me: Imagine you had a control panel where you could just make anyone do whatever you want. That is what power is, the ability to make other people do what you want. Now, how is a law going to help against your power? It can't. Even if you allowed someone to enact a law that forbade you from killing people (obviously, you could use your total power to prevent that in the first place): If you can in fact stop anyone from trying to enforce this law on you (and in this thought experiment, you obviously can), then the law is completely inconsequential. This is so dangerous. Governments all across the globe are slowly taking away bits and pieces of the people’s rights under the guise of protecting society. How long before these oppressive governments begin burning books and limiting how much money any one citizen can possess. Our tax dollars are being used against us. We are paying our enemies to grow stronger and use that strength to oppress us! Not only that, once we're a cashless society, when the next crisis rolls around then the government can actually set negative interest rates in order to 'encourage' spending. If you can't have a stash under the bed then all of your money is at the whim of the governments and banks [and politicians, hackers, etc..... not you]. "The phrase “war on cash” suggests a parallel to the “war on drugs” and aptly so. In both wars, traditional civil liberties are shunted aside in the criminalization, surveillance, and prosecution of victimless private activities ... The war on cash might be more accurately labelled the “war on people who use cash.” What are suppressed by the above-listed tactics are not inanimate objects but people. Cash itself experiences no harms. People do. Coercive anti-cash policies abridge the freedom and reduce the welfare of peaceful individuals who prefer to use cash. ... The war on cash is being waged for the exclusive benefit of those who already wield an inordinate amount of power and control over the economy and the people that are struggling in it. And they want more. By slowly, quietly killing cash, they seek to seize the last remaining thing that offers people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives."