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The Curse of the War on Cash | Cato Institute

As Larry White, someone who I always take very seriously in any such discussion, says in the Cato Journal “Some other writers and officials… do seek a cashless society. They want to drive all transactions into forms that leave an audit trail for the law enforcement and tax authorities”. I think I’m probably in this category. While I appreciate the arguments of Larry and others about anonymity, I do not agree with them. This is because I do not see that the only two options as being anonymous physical cash or unconditionally traceable digital money. We have a wide variety of tools available to us to construct the next generation of digital money and 

As Larry notes in one of his examples, the Swiss National Bank is "the most important central bank still bucking the trend". It has said that it has no plans to withdraw its 1,000 Swiss Franc note. But what are these notes used for? I read the Swiss National Bank’s payment survey for 2017, the most recent available, and it reports that 

 

 

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