To quote Nouriel Roubini, Economist:
No use ever, past, present and future for XRP and Ripple products... it is already flopping after spending a fortune and printing a huge amount of totally useless XRP. (Now the XRP army of Twitter trolls, bots, hired guns and zealots will attack again...)
He gave a scathing talk criticizing cryptocurrencies and blockchains and all other things in the space. I shook his hand afterwards and told him that while I disagreed with some of his opinions, I really respected his conviction to give a talk to a room full of "crypto zealots" and stick to his opinions.
A very kind fellow in conversation, but he sure knows how to deliver bitter critique.
"Imagine you go into a room of computer scientists and say: 'I've developed the most secure form of money possible, it's so secure you can't keep it on your computer and you have to dig a hole in your backyard and keep it there' you'd be laughed out of the room."
In Europe, there's the E500 bill, which is a bit more practical for large amounts, and some have expressed a desire to withdraw it from circulation for this reason.
That's why the Bundesbank have always been inflation hawks and had to be convinced that the Euro would remain similar in focus to the Deutschmark.
Whether that is still true after 2008 is an interesting question :)
My understanding as an expat was the same as alasdair's - 2010-2015 I saw plenty of Germans drop a couple 500s to pay for hotel stays, major appliances, etc. Few people had a credit card and those that did didn't want to use it domestically. It's changing now but people still carry more cash and true credit card payments are still often impossible even as bank cards are now more common.
I guess you could argue this is also related to Weimar inflation, but I don't think it's so specific. Germany has seen multiple major regime changes in the space of one lifetime.
The scale of the cutback that Brüning enacted from 1930 to 1932 is truly staggering. The authors estimate that Brüning cut German government spending by about 15 percent, after inflation, from 1930 to 1932. He raised income taxes on high earners by an average of 10 percent, and slashed unemployment, pension, and welfare benefits. The economic consequences were horrific. GDP fell by 15 percent, as did government revenue. Unemployment increased from 22.7 percent to 43.8 percent. Brüning came to be known as the “Hunger Chancellor.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-saft/saft-on-weal...
Roubini sure called that one.