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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> According to that same article, the reason for retiring the note was because the people who benefited the most from its existence are criminals, who need to do their business in cash -- the fewer notes, the easier for them.

This is what they want the citizens to believe.

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In 2016 India did the infamous demonetization claiming that the ₹500 notes were used in hoarding black money and funding terrorism.

It ended up massively shocking the unorganised economy, and the nation is still recovering from it. The main reasons the government stated while doing it are still going on. The entire exercise didn't solve any problems.

I don't have any actual knowledge of the effects of this in India.

However, I think that when a member of the general public makes sweeping statements like "the entire exercise didn't solve any problems" it's only flaunting prejudices. If you work at a job related to infrastructure, the details would be incredibly boring to the public, and certainly aren't shared. But you could see something was double or half the year before, and it would mean infinitely more than a million people parroting what everyone always says because they always think the same thing.

I wonder if we are meant to think of drug dealers but the governments are just as worried about the local handyman or small construction company getting untraceable cash payments without paying taxes.

This is why so many taxi drivers say their "credit card reader is broken"

They aren't getting enough €50 or $100 notes to be a real logistical problem. You can put 10k in your pocket, and count it in a minute or two.

If you have large piles of money to launder, one way is to build a rental property and pay all the materials/contractors in cash.

But now harder to do that with 5x the bills. Or suddenly stuck with 500s that nobody wants to take.

Wait... how do you explain the appearance of the building with no expenses shown except "from cash"?

There are expenses, they're just not the right expenses.

At least in Canada, the city cares about building permits, but doesn’t do any checking on how the building/construction was paid for.

Banks don’t really question rent cheque’s coming in every month, or a large bank transfer coming from your lawyer for the sale of property.

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