Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are for sure tradeoffs here, but in Germany for example they recently made paying in cash for real estate illegal because it was obvious that almost all those cash transactions involved crime money of some sort. Edit: As noted below cash here refers to paper money. The same law also prohibits real estate purchase with gold, silver, diamonds or crypto currencies.
So people were handing over suitcases containing millions in cold hard cash!? Is there ever a legitimate reason to do that?
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.