The decision is currently being considered by the Australian lawmakers. This bill would ban any transactions amounting to AUD$10000 or more that are made in cash. This means that any amount of money close to $6900 will be considered illegal, if exchanged in cash. The move comes as a result of the Australian lawmakers deciding to make a move that would showcase the Australian attitude towards people avoiding paying tax when paying cash.
This decision has resulted in a negative public outcry, while those who are more into the cryptocurrency sphere have come out, announcing that the decision only shows how important the creation of digital currencies is and how significant a role they could be playing in the future of the world economy. Anyone who wants to make a large transaction that will not be directly monitored by the government or a large scale institution, such as a bank, will now have to start utilizing Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. So, while this might not mean much for transactions to numerous Australian online casinos, it will mean that paying at a casino in cash might become illegal after a certain amount of money.
A bad sign
For the general population, the news was not positive at all. Quite on the contrary, the Australians who are aware of the law coming into effect sooner rather than later have expressed their discontent. Many Australians find that it is going against their interests to not be able to pay for large quantities of money in cash. They believe that this is the government trying to limit the freedom that people enjoy in their everyday lives. Many people who work in the field agree. A financial professional who believes that money is just one of the many languages that people use in order to communicate with the world said that banning cash is only another step in banning free speech.
According to Andreas Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin educator and a financial specialist, the presence of such policies is a way to limit the freedoms of the citizens. There are already cashless societies with laws against exchanging large quantities of money such as this, and they are turning out to be quite stressful to the citizens of the country. China, for example, is one of these early cashless societies, which requires every transaction made by the people to be done through a bank. According to Andreas, this society has an extremely limited set of freedoms for their people, and the social credit system is further encouraged by this policy. The social credit system is the one which allows the government to restrict people from travelling, or even going on the internet, as per their “record” of being good or bad. A bank contributes to the social credit system as much as a prison system.
Australia building a cashless society only means that it is trying to expand the level of control it is exerting over its people. But, despite the increase in control over cash transactions, Australia is refraining from applying the same restrictions to online currencies. The Australian lawmakers believe that the digital currency industry in the US is extremely new and extremely fresh, and doing something on the scale of what they are doing in the case of cash would be extremely damaging to the further growth of the industry.
This has become the cause for many bankers, financial professionals and Bitcoin specialists to start talking about the value of Bitcoin as a way to function in a cashless society. In a country where every transaction is done through a bank, Bitcoin permits the freedom of choice in payment that cannot and is not afforded by traditional banking systems.
