You misunderstand.

We are talking hard paper cash here. It might help if we quote a translated excerpt here :

This practice is now being abolished by the introduction of Sec. 16a GwG. From 1 April 2023, it will only be possible to purchase real estate using means of payment other than cash, crypto assets, gold, platinum or precious stones. All parties to the transaction are required to present satisfactory proof of payment, for example a payment confirmation from a financial institution.

(source of excerpt https://www.gvw.com/en/news/blog/detail/prohibition-on-cash-...)

You can still do a bank transfer. The point is the money has to pass though a "real" financial institution.

Electronic transfers such as ACH would be allowed.

One of my banks forbids making bank transfers of over 10,000 EUR. The other is not far behind.

Even then, sometimes they simply decide that they're not going to allow you to make bank transfers to certain perfectly legitimate accounts. There is no way to override that.

For the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly transfer for paying my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the allowable daily limit", even though I haven't done any transfers or significant payments lately, and my rent is way below the 10,000 EUR limit.

You also can't withdraw large sums of money easily.

Furthermore, even when they allow these large transfers (which presumably would require you to physically visit a branch which might be in a different country or even continent), it's not uncommon to charge a not insignificant percentage of that money as a fee. This is significantly more common for large transfers than for small ones.

Large inbound transfers can be even more of a hassle, as banks often require you to provide documents justifying why you're receiving that money, which not only might be difficult in some cases (even when you're not doing anything illegal), but also invades your privacy and can be a significant security risk in some situations.

All of this basically makes banks a prison for your money, which not even you can access easily.

And besides, all that is assuming that you are even able to open a bank account.

There are many reasons for why opening a bank account is hard or even impossible in many cases.

And believe me, this doesn't happen in just one or two banks, it's quite common procedure in practically every bank, and increasingly so.

It's in the two countries in Europe where I've lived.

> if I call my bank and tell them I need to transfer 500,000 to buy a house they will allow it

What you're saying is not possible in the banks I've used.

To buy houses, I've had to set up appointments and physically go to the central office of one of the banks, and to a local branch of another. They provided me with a special bank-issued cheque for the transaction.

In one of the cases, this required me to travel to another country just for this purpose.

It was a significant hassle and even then I was lucky that this was in an adjacent country. It could have easily been in the other side of the world.

> The limit is there is to prevent fraud.

Right... fraud... of course!

Is that why one of the banks only allows me to set up a 5 digit password (yes, only numbers) to access my account? And why the other one only allows me to set up a 6 digit password (again, only numbers)?

Is that also why they require me to dictate this same password (and other ones) over the phone when I want to make a large transaction? So that other people who are physically near me can hear the passwords easily?

And that's even assuming I typed their phone number correctly in my phone, otherwise I would be giving my passwords to strangers!

Look, I really don't care if it's fraud, or money laundering laws, or because the Pope mandated it.

I've never been a victim of fraud, it's extremely unlikely for me to ever be a victim of fraud in the future, I'm not doing anything illegal and it's my money.

There are many other ways to deal with fraud, such as having most of the money locked (e.g. in a separate account, with more restrictions or delays), providing notifications, using two-factor authentication, calling the customers to confirm the transaction, etc, etc.

And yes, I know in many banks they also do a subset of these, but even then the restrictions are still there.

I'm sorry, but fraud alone does not explain what's happening, unless the banks are extremely incompetent (and yes, it's quite possible that they are).

Regardless, the end result is the same: I simply cannot use my money easily, period.

My friend worked for an insurance company that would regularly receive double digit thousands cash payments on policies from pot farms because they can't have bank accounts.