Still, I'm personally not in the eurozone, but in general terms for the end user high-denomination notes are not very useful unless you're gonna store them under your bed (and governments don't like this, they'd rather everybody be bancarized). Actually using them to buy things is a pain, since most businesses won't accept them. Having one in your wallet is a problem that you have to take care of, instead of just money

This is what they want the citizens to believe.

It ended up massively shocking the unorganised economy, and the nation is still recovering from it. The main reasons the government stated while doing it are still going on. The entire exercise didn't solve any problems.

However, I think that when a member of the general public makes sweeping statements like "the entire exercise didn't solve any problems" it's only flaunting prejudices. If you work at a job related to infrastructure, the details would be incredibly boring to the public, and certainly aren't shared. But you could see something was double or half the year before, and it would mean infinitely more than a million people parroting what everyone always says because they always think the same thing.

But now harder to do that with 5x the bills. Or suddenly stuck with 500s that nobody wants to take.

Banks don’t really question rent cheque’s coming in every month, or a large bank transfer coming from your lawyer for the sale of property.

For me it always went smoothly when buying something that exceeded the value of the high note. Your experience may differ if you buy a roll in the bakery.

I took it on my trip to Austria a week later and got it changed at the post office.

Didn’t think they would know any better than the cashiers...

And then, they tell bitcoiners they are crazy for denouncing the overreach of central banks.

At least I learned that France has several central banks.

You’re kinda SOL if you go to a euroized non-EU country (Montenegro or Kosovo).

The United States used to print $100,000 notes. They were only available to banks for moving from bank to bank, I believe, and so were useful for reducing the number of notes that needed to be stored by banks, while keeping them out of the hands of criminals.

I seem to remember in that era they were useful for some people. My mother worked for a bank in Manhattan and on paydays she would take her check downstairs and cash it, come home with the money in her bra, and then deposit it in our local bank.

Why she didn't just deposit her check, I can't say. Maybe she didn't trust the bank she worked for. Or maybe cash cleared faster than a deposited check.

I used to cash my paychecks at a check cashing store for the same reason. Even though they took a small fee the convenience of having money for the weekend was worth it.

These days we have reliable, trusted deposit insurance, but that didn't exist until the 1930s. People didn't really trust it until a few decades later.

While I agree with your premise that inflation makes $500-1,000 notes practical from the standpoint of modern expenses, businesses I interact with tend to prefer a third party to verify payment (CC merchant, cashiers check, etc.).

Cash is dying and although I love convenience, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.

Landlords, for one. I'm in the process of leasing a new apartment and I am required to pay some of the fees with a debit card, and some with a cashier's check. It would be easier to just hand them a few large bills and be done with it.

Cash is dying and although I love convenience, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.

I try to use cash as much as I can. I also have active checking and savings accounts simply because I don't want to have a single point of failure.

I estimate the building I'm renting from right now would have anywhere between $650-750k or more revenue per month, most of which probably arrives in a one week or less window. That makes them a target for all sorts of potential thefts: employees, residents, burglars.

I've rented at many places and I've never once encountered a landlord that accepted or wanted to accept cash over secure electronic transfer methods, even for minor expenses like a consumer credit report check.

I'm usually pretty hesitant to accept anything over a $20 or even deal in cash for small exchanges. I wouldn't even consider $500 unless I had a way to strongly guarentee the bill I'm looking at isn't fake.

It would take a bit of time and research before I felt confident enough at identifying these bills to accept them in a trade. I'd have to do a lot of those sort of peer transactions to warrant the overhead of that time.

If such bills were in common use, nearly everybody would know and be aware of the usual security features. So, this is only a problem because such large bills are so rare.

I was working as a cashier and a Japanese tourist came in and asked if could split it up for him. It would have emptied my register, so I politely declined.

Only time I ever saw one in person.

So they were discontinued when they couldn't find any non-criminal bankers?

Once electronic settlement became common, these bills became obsolete.

Obviously, using verification information such as a phone number from the note itself is susceptible to scamming, but discovering the contact information through multiple reputable external sources then contacting the bank from this information has extremely low risk of being scammed.

Paid $22,000 in Y10,000 notes for a private event once. The staff didn't even bat an eye.

A cashier's check is like a domestic SWIFT.

It's difficult to imagine in a modern world, people or institutions writing or printing something on a piece of paper, and saying, "here, this is money".

Got stuck behind someone at the Carrefour (grocery store) paying with one. Ugh.

Some people/business will still ask for a cashier's check though.

I agree, cashiers checks are safer, but some people have reasons to prefer cash.

In the UK, government benefits are paid by bank transfer.

Some, like Sweden and Italy, going to extremes to phase cash out of existence, the latter making 'large' cash transaction punishable by jail/fine.

I lived in EU during the financial crisis, and when cash got scarce prompting places in Greece to issue their own local currency [1] to do basic transactions (kids in school were passing out due to a lack of food, hospitals were running out of medicine and basic supplies in general) many were confident you would see something like this: Germany hoarding cash while the PIIGS were left to their own devices.

Its sad, the problems paper fiat currencies beget: be they the promises of utilitarianism or the illusions of prosperity its one I wish we can finally overcome soon.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/europe/in-greece-ba...

Didn't something similar recently happen when Modi was trying to ban cash in India? Kinda backfired. Cash (and gold) will probably never die there.

This way, neither the buyer nor the seller needs to carry large amounts of cash with them. The cashier's check is not given unless the buyer's account has enough funds to cover it, so the seller doesn't need to worry about a bounced check.

I've always bought and sold vehicles (or anything private sale) in cash in Canada because I am extremely leery of reversible payment methods where the payment account owner can claim 'fraud' and I'm out the item and the money.

Craigslist and Kijiji (the most popular online classifieds platforms) explicitly warn people to deal only in cash because of this problem.

This rule is new though, it went into effect in December: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

> Charges levied by a payment service provider on a payment service user in respect of cross-border payments in euro shall be the same as the charges levied by that payment service provider for corresponding national payments of the same value in the national currency of the Member State in which the payment service provider of the payment service user is located.

It's extremely convenient to be able to pay anyone any amount at any time with nothing more than your phone.

For large transactions transfer for a fee already existed. CHAPS will move much larger sums of money (it's typically used to buy property so certainly millions but perhaps more) for a modest fee. You wouldn't want that fee on your weekly groceries, but when you just bought a house who cares?

Last I looked the backend for Faster Payments wasn't actually built. The big banks decided instead "temporarily" to just trust each other. If Bank A says Cathy sent Mike £5000 then Bank B where Mike's account is will credit Mike £5000 (probably instantly), presumably Bank A will reduce Cathy's account by £5000 and the two banks agree they'll settle things at the end of the day. This is only scary if Bank A might not actually have that £5000 to give Bank B at the end of the day when it's settled, which in principle should never happen under current financial regulations.

Incorrect. I tried to buy a new car in France with a credit card. That was an extremely awkward moment. I was kindly told that this was a very weird thing to ask.

Instead of a small, fixed fee (e.g. £0.10) it's now also 0.2%.

https://www.am-online.com/opinion/2016/12/06/opinion-debit-c...

(The article does at least tell us that "many" customers pay for the full price of the car with a debit card.)

At least, that's the way it was back in 2006, when my wife and I moved from Brussels, Belgium back to the US.

I remember many long hours sat at one of those ATMs (yes, they had private seating for most of them), paying various bills electronically using the bank account number given to us by the company that sent us the bill.

Recently instant SEPA transfers have made this easier, but not available between all banks.

Insurance is indeed mandatory, but you can get it online in 5 minutes. Or by phone. They call it "drive away coverage" that works immediately but requires signing the final policy etc within something like a week.

It's actually the only possible way to buy a new car.

If you don't believe me, go try and buy a car with a credit card in the EU, see what happens.

People downvoting others in disbelief should try to find a source by themselves before.

https://www.agenciatributaria.es/AEAT.internet/Inicio/_Segme...

[0] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu...

next thing will be 200 euro bills revoked, then the base rate can go down to around -1%.

As far as I am aware, among all the Euro countries, Germans are particularly fond of cash.

Since I work in an area that is related to finance (think in the direction of planning/writing business applications for the banking sector), I seriously very often get asked (in Germany) whether one should cash out all the money from the bank account and store it in a strong private safe to avoid the negative interest of the banks that are in the wind.

In effect this makes X% of cash "burn off" every period, and allows the monetary authority to set any negative effective interest rate that they want.

This is by no means an endorsement of negative rates. But if you're going to go down that road, it's a better scheme than just trying to make holding cash too much of a pain in the ass.

It is in essence part of the same eradicating rights movement that is fighting against anonymity in the internet. "Hey look, there are some criminals benefiting from it so let's kill it."

The actual law simply isn't that notable in these cases, because the big guys have enough money to figure out how to navigate it liability-free.

Which is also why the law only really applies to the poor -- with enough time and resources, there's always a workaround.

The point is to not make it convenient for them at all.

"widely used currencies" can be read as "usd, eur, jpy, cny, gbp, cad", although chf is up there it seems.