So is there a legitimate reason to want to be able to use large amounts of cash

Before answering this question we should define “a large amount” as it stands today, I, a private citizen with no criminal record, who hasn’t ever been investigated by fiscal authorities in my life, can’t spend more than €2000 in cash or else I’ll face a huge fine and I’ll be automatically considered a “money launderer” and a “financial criminal”

Now, to answer your question: personal data is digital gold, it’s only natural people don’t want their banks to track every thing they buy, your data won’t just be sold to the highest bidder. It will be sold and shared to the “1683 partners” you see on the cookie banners. Not wanting your financial and spending data to be sold and shared with thousands of (sometimes really malicious) entities. Not wanting the prostitution of your data, and, to the maximum possible extent not participating in this coercitive datamining system (you don’t really have a choice, every bank does this to some often cryptically disclosed if disclosed extent) is the legitimate reason I believe cash is a payment method that, when possible, should be used.

To clarify my position: I don’t oppose limitations on cash transactions necessarily because I want to buy something like a car with cash, buying a car still requires extensive paperwork and as such most privacy benefits from paying cash vanish instantly. I oppose the marginalization of cash because it’s leading to a bankized societiy, we are seeing it with our very eyes.

At least where I live you:

can’t get your paycheck in cash

can’t withdraw more than an undisclosed amount, else you’re suspicious and may be investigated, without your knowledge (oh, and the burden of proof is on you!)

Can’t receive many welfare benefits without a bank account

A bank account is nothing short of mandatory, yet there’s not national bank you can open an account in. School is mandatory, public schools exist.

Private banks offer many benefits such as:

Investing in fossil fuel companies.

Not ensuring a single cent of the money they should keep safe, a national fund ensures up to €100k,but if it was for the banks id let you guess.

Offering subpar and overpriced investment products with ludicrous fees to unsuspecting and financially illiterate but often hard-working people, eroding their life savings.

Seeing the above points, I tend to look with distrust at laws, regulations etc that aim at pushing people into banks. People should be able to live their entire life without opening a bank account if they want, and without being judged as criminals.

It’s not like this is impossible, there are places with way less financial crime than my country, than the USA or other countries who restrict cash who don’t marginalize cash as much, countries such as Japan or Germany.

but this is a privacy basically nobody chose to have anyway

If there wasn’t a societal unspoken obligation to have a bank account, many people would have ditched theirs a long time ago, me very much included, people are just coerced into accepting it. Not saying we should live like financial hermits, just that we should stop accepting the status quo, and that many people only use their bank account to receive their salary and withdraw it later, maybe put something away if they can afford it. That shouldn’t require your data to be mined.

It’s 100% because they want it to be traceable. I’m not sure, but I think I’m OK with that.

Yes criminals use cash because it’s private, but criminals also use:

• E2E encryption
• VPNs
• Private operating systems (Linux, Android ROMs)

Criminals use private technology because they need to hide from the police. That does not mean we need to ban or heavily restrict (current state of cash in parts of the world, such as the USA or the EU) private options and private technologies just because “criminals use them” if you accept a ban on privacy and an increase in surveillance in order to counter criminality, you will receive an omnipotent government and corporations spying on you with a mandate.

The criminals will just go even more underground. They always adapt, they always had and always will.

We must not sacrify privacy in exchange for “safety”

There are cases in which the status quo kills way more in the long term than a revolution would in the short term, I agree with you that a war, expecially a civil war fought expecially on national soil brings misery and destruction to the nation, but it is sometimes a necessary evil in the short term in order to avoid a way bigger evil in the long run. To make another Italian example, the fascist regime killed hundreds of thousands of people, 120.000 innocents died only in Lybia during the deportation of the cyrenaican people, that’s less than all of the deaths in the Italian Civil War!

didn’t say that all revolutions are bad. It’s usually a mixed bag, some good, some bad

I think we agree on this one, I thought you meant revolution was inherently evil. Better to clarify and argument further nevertheless, For posterity. Peace.

By that logic all of America should still be partitioned between the Spanish, British, Portuguese and French.

I understand this is an hyperbole, but still, let’s take for example the French revolution: sure Napoleon crowned himself emperor and in the end left France in a worst state than before, but he gave the whole world some important advancements that in many (often subtle) ways still reverberate today:

for example, his monetary policies are the reason we have 1,2,5,10,20,50 of a given currency and the respective cents, and not an arbitrary system of fractions (old European coinage could get absurd, I suggest who’s interested to go on numista.com or a similar site and check for yourself) .

He helped introducing the concept of separation of church and state to the general public (not much considerated before).

He helped the nascent industrialist class to emerge and impose itself, gradually stamping out the remains of feudalism from Europe.

He advanced history in many ways I can’t even start to mention.

Let’s take another example, you can think what you want of the Soviet Union and I can agree to various criticisms, but living in the Russian empire in the 1900s (even before WW1) was like living 3 centuries in the past. People lived in misery and died young, servitude was abolished only 50 years before.

The Communists took a country that barely surpassed feudalism (in the cities) and gave basic dignities to its citizens, arriving to compete, militarily and economically, with the strongest superpower in history.

Can be argued it degenerated after Lenin’s death, but it’s undeniable that, even under stalin’s time, life was magnitudinally better than even 30 years prior (and to be fair that’s an enormously low bar)

Essù, anche noi abbiamo fatto ben 3 (tre) guerre per ľindipendenza contro ľaustria, evidentemente la gente lo voleva! Concordo che non sempre quando rovesci il governo vai a finire meglio (vedi Hitler, giovani turchi) ma gli Italiani lombardi/veneti/friulani sotto cecco Beppe non se la passano proprio bene… Non che i SaBoia fossero meglio, ma ľautodeterminazione dei popoli è una cosa importante per cui (a mio avviso) vale la pena combattere se si è oppressi.