3/4s I believe.
I hope I'm right, I just mailed my US citizenship application in this morning. This may come up in the test.
]]>Agreed on all counts. I am Italian, living in Germany and visited most Euro countries: the largest denomination in current usage is the 50 Euros note. I have personally handled a 100 Euros maybe 3-4 times since the introduction of the Euros, and never seen a 200 or 500 in the wild. I also remember signs at airport exchange booths stating that they won't deal in larger denominations.
I have recently visited London, and I was delighted by the fact that I never had to pay cash for anything (except visiting the Dr.Who museum on the back of the Who Shop, but that was done by the person I was with). It is really convenient, just like online banking for most bills. At the same time, I would oppose moving to a completely e-money society, in part because I know that older or less educated people would be at a disadvantage, and also because it would be a limitation of my freedom: I want to be able to decide if I prefer electronic or cash (or even cheques, yeah, why not?) according to my own preferences.
Finally, the (now quite old) Neuoromancer trilogy by William Gibson had an interesting take on what happens when everybody is forced to use e-money: old, outdated New Yen banknotes are used as a sort of illegal currency, i.e. they are used mostly for illegal deals, but still hold great value, precisely because these are not traceable.
]]>Me too, because having a bank account is a regressive tax[1] on the poor.
Leaving aside all worries about privacy etc, a bank account is an expensive thing to have. To avoid crippling fees[2], you need to maintain a certain minimum balance. To those of us with savings, that's just our savings. But to someone living paycheque-to-paycheque, that's a significant amount of money. Fall below, and the fees add up fast.
I've heard that in Europe the post offices have banks that are geared for very small amounts, but in Canada user fees and transaction charges are a perennial complaint about the banks.
[1] OK, it's a privately imposed tax by the banks, not the government, but the effect is the same.
[2] Crippling in terms of the transaction cost.
]]>This is another excellent point that I had missed. Also, regarding post offices providing saving management: yes, this was already in place many years ago, at least in my country, but then Banks were providing alternative forms of saving management, too (when I was before legal age to open an account I had something called Libretto di Risparmio, i.e. a booklet where deposit and withdrawal were manually registered by a bank officer, you kept the booklet at home, but I presume that the bank had a log too). Post offices now are closer to a normal bank (but I suppose they have much lower fees) and will provide an ATM card and possibly even a Credit Card: this is also due to the fact that "traditional" postal services have been either privatized (package shipping) or have declined in usage (letters and postcards) so Post Offices have scrambled to diversify their offerings as much as possible - see for example: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/29/11536246/finland-postal-service-lawn-mowing-USPS
]]>One is that this is why blood diamonds and drugs are so popular: they're lighter than cash, and just as hard to trace.
In a related note, there's a push to get rid of higher denomination bank notes in various countries, because they tend to be used mostly for criminal enterprises. Also, lower denominations weigh more for the same value, so getting rid of $500 notes means that someone has to carry five times as many $100 notes to make the same purchase.
On the third side, there's a whole industry out there designed to hide wealth, and if you believe the newspaper articles, there's more wealth being hidden by international shell companies and the like, than there is in the US national budget. This is the ultimate form of untraceable wealth. I mean, theoretically it is traceable, but once you go through the layers of shells, the countries who have deliberately designed their laws to make these transactions opaque, and so on, it's very difficult for an outsider to figure out exactly who owns what.
I'd point out that this whole elaborate set-up is ripe for a jubilee hack, wherein (like the iron and bronze age revolutionaries who burned the debt books so that everyone would be free), you crash the financial systems of various countries, leading to no information on who owns what, in which circumstance revolutionaries can simply claim stuff, distribute it to their followers, and set up new ownership rules as they go.
]]>When I arrived in Australia about 2000 that was the case. But there was a wave of change and these days fee-free accounts are the norm. To the point where I have accounts with three different banks purely because that's easier than grinding through the process to close the accounts.
There's no need for those fees any more, at least with the more internet-enabled banks. An accurate fee would be a few cents a year which would mostly over the reporting costs (in other words the exact cost will be determined by regulation). If the bank is required to post you a bit of paper every year the cost will go up to cover the paper.
Down here I get an email every few months saying "you didn't use your bank account" plus an annual "you didn't do anything that causes taxes" email statement. Amusingly I did get an email saying "your card expired. If you want another one you have to ask" (there was no fee, I suspect it's a way to de-activate unused accounts).
]]>You can also deposit cash, but only $3000 at a time. As I discovered when I sold a DSLR online and the buyer opted to pick it up and pay cash (which is quire reasonable and entirely legal but somewhat annoying. Still, it beats waiting 10-20 minutes for a bitcoin transaction to finalise).
The pain point is people paying bills. Partly inherent, in that a transaction takes a certain amount of time, but partly it seems to be the people who pay bills that way are generally not the fastest or best-prepared sorts of people. So half the transactions involve the person behind the counter having to explain things (like, bob help us, "if you only pay half the bill you're likely to get cut off, even if that number is printed somewhere on the bill" (two different people trying to pay the connection charge but not the usage charge on a utility bill while I waited behind them).
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