Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands

It is not illegal though, and you can in fact pay arbitrary amounts of cash for instance at hospitals or jewellery stores, with PAN. I am okay with this oversight, though I'm not too happy about the middlemen. I can't think of any legitimate usecases where one wouldn't want to share PAN, unless they are underreporting income and evading taxes. While I'm often unhappy with how my tax money gets spent, I still begrudgingly pay my taxes and have no sympathy for black money.

We also have instant and free transfers via UPI, and I can transfer any amount, even 1 INR (Approx 1 cent EUR) to anyone. I make about a dozen upi transactions everyday, for practically everything. Roadside snacks to in mall purchases. This further reduces the need for carrying cash. There are only a few holdouts, such as bus tickets purchased on the spot, or the ocassional auto rikshaws that demand cash.

Even foriegn tourists now can "pay lik an Indian", with upi, to borrow marketing slogans from the airport adverts.

Transacting large amounts in cash(banknotes) is going to become increasingly difficult across the world, for better or worse.

The results will be known sooner or later.

Bank transfers in the EU are instant, and there are no fees for personal accounts.

> Imagine I bought the car on Friday afternoon. The seller would get the money earliest on Monday.

No, the seller would get the money before they could even blink.

I have accounts at 2 unrelated banks. I have my online banking apps set up that whenever I get a deposit over a certain amount I get a push notification. When I use my online banking app to transfer money from my account at bank A to my account at bank B, I get an alert from bank B’s app to inform me of the money appearing in my account before the app from bank A has even shown me the confirmation screen that the transfer request was received.

This is true for any two banks in a SEPA country.

I don’t do it often; last time was when I moved to the UK without a British bank account and did not want to pay any transfer fees, which are quite expensive for larger sums (I had to carry enough to live one month and pay a first month’s rent before getting my first pay check). Another one was when I had to buy a computer after having reach the 7-days ceiling in my debit card (now you can increase it on the bank’s app; it used to be more complicated).