Well, I am no expert but let me play the futurist here. After they killed the 200 Euro note it is going to be the 100 Euro note that is going to be used by those damn criminals!

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."

In the UK, £20 notes are the highest commonly used. That doesn't mean they get rid of cash. There are just very, very few cases where you need that much cash that £20 notes are impracticable.

There are valid reasons to have anonymity on the internet - plenty of them. It's really hard for me to grok the intrinsic value and human right of carrying a 200 note instead of two hundreds. If I'm gift giving, maybe, but frankly I can't stand getting hundreds as gifts, they're a pain to spend and just cause more work for me.

I am against giving up any rights of individual freedom whatever so small the real value thereof is. I see it as a matter of gradually eroding the right of anonymous transaction/cash from the top and the bottom. They went after the 500 Euro bill and currently are on the way to kill the 1 and 2 cent coins. In 5 years they will go after the 200 Euro bill and so on.

agree

The really big criminals and tax evaders will ever find a way around this kind of restriction. This is useful to control the smaller fish. But, also, the cynic in me thinks that the big sharks have lots of friends in high places and politics and public administration and that those restrictions were never intended to catch them on the first place.

I doubt most of these laws are ever intended to catch the big fish -- like in business, the big guys always require special handling to process. For criminals, the big guys should already be so far disassociated with the actual activity that you're not going to catch them with normal crimes. For example, Al Capone was famously trialed on tax evasion, rather than any of the innumerable crimes he committed but couldn't be processed for.

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.

Small net for small fish. Big net for big fish. There's also no problem with getting criminals to go through extra steps. The more processes, the more room for error.

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

It seems the CHF 1000 note has the highest value among all.

Good luck using one though in Brazil or Vietnam - they're illiquid relative to euros or dollars and therefore harder to launder.

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