I carried wads of cash when I lived in Indonesia, because card acceptance is so unreliable it's easier to just pay by cash. Bills of 100,000 (~€6.50) are the largest, and while prices are lower than in Europe or Canada, they're not necessarily that much lower for a lot of things. It's a bit awkward, but doable I guess shrug.

I paid 6 million in cash for my scooter, and you can imagine what that looked like. Upshot is I felt very rich and like one of those fellas in those rap videos throwing around money.

The US began withdrawing their $500/1000/5000/10000 notes in the 1960s as well; the last issues were nominally before WWII.

There was some discussion around the turn of the century that the introduction of the 200/500 Euro notes might impact the USD's status as the dominant "notes in a coffee can buried in the yard" store of wealth for the developing world, but it never went anywhere.

It is interesting that this seems to be a remarkable amount of faith in inflation being a managed slow-walk-- if you had Weimar-style inflation, any fixed limit would be blown through in weeks. Although, perhaps that's a secondary objective there-- if an economy with high paper-trail requirements starts to overheat, pinching the monitoring system might provide additional leverage.

I am generally in favor of limits for anonymous payments, but you raise an excellent point.

What logically follows is that the it should be codified that the limit should be raised periodically (yearly?) based on the inflation rate.

That's one problem, but the other is that big parts of our lives are moving online/digital, even in the physical world.

Getting gas at night in rural parts of the US without a credit or debit card is already practically impossible – there's nobody there to take your cash. Card-only restaurants, vending machines, shops etc. are already a reality in some countries as well.

I think we urgently need a semi-anonymous, cash-like alternative for low-value online and offline payments, because I feel like once we've lost the anonymity of cash completely, there's no way it'll be reintroduced in a digital equivalent.

The discussion around this seems largely poisoned though, with a lot of vocal crypto/libertarian takes on one side (often tangling the payment privacy aspect with monetary policy), and "nothing to hide, log everything, credit cards and ACH are perfection" on the other.