He's probably talking about the horror stories of people getting their cash/assets seized via civil forfeiture. eg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/01/police-seiz...

Yeah, that's different from carrying cash being illegal.

It makes it illegal in practice, just not in name.

Are you really free if you have any arbitrarily defined “large” amount of money, only to have it sorted and it become YOUR burden of proof to show the origins of the cash?

Cash transactions over 10,000 lakh are illegal in India [1]. Spain, France and Greece have all recently introduced limits [2]. Germany [3] has tried to introduce similar limits but have failed (so far). Australia's introducing a limit soon [4].

[1] https://babatax.com/cash-transaction-limit-in-india-cash-pay...

[2] https://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/28/europe-limits-on-cash-tran...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/08/german-plan-pr...

[4] https://www.accountantsdaily.com.au/business/14087-governmen...

Sure, there are limits of non-tax-traceable payments in a few places. The part that surprised me was literally "carry too much cash" which is not quite the same thing.

In my country (Italy) is kind of illegal. I mean, not carrying too much cash (but of course if they find you with a suitcase full of cash, they will ask you where you got all that cash from), but you can't pay in a shop more than 2.000 euros (and they will lower this limit to 1.000 and possibly less in the future). Also you can't pay your employee cash, you have to pay in traceable manners something that you want to deduct from taxes like medical expenses, and so on.

Transaction with cash between private citizens are permitted tough (like buying a used car in cash), but it's not a good idea to do so if you don't trust the other party (because then how can I prove that I gave you the money?)