I get that large bills provide more opportunities for conterfeiters, money launderers, and other (in the eyes of the State) bad actors, I am surprised to see how low the line is being drawn. In the US they only go up to $100.[0]

The worrying thing is simply that it's in the State's interest to have every monetary transaction be electronic and thus entirely traceable, also in aggregate; whereas it's in my interest to be able to spend (or loan, or give away) my money privately.

The lower the available currency denominations, the more this balance shifts towards the State.

[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

Okay, I understand that there are not that many usecases for a 500€ note and whenever I paid something >500€ in cash, I appreciated the flexibility of 50€ notes. But that Harvard Kennedy School also asked for the withdrawal of £50 and $100 notes? Again, $100 is probably not that useful, 100€ notes were usually a nice touch for Christmas gifts by parents/grandparents.

But £50? ATMs tend to give me a bunch of 50€ notes and I like them. Everybody likes them. They’re not too large that you can still buy gum with one and not too small that your wallet is all cluttered up. I understand that £50 is slightly more, but not that much more to go down to £20/20€ for it.

Senior ECB officials said at the time [in 2016] that they needed more evidence that the notes facilitated criminal activity.

So did they find the evidence or not? The article omits this information.

Surprised it took them so long to get rid of them.

From an article[0] I found from when the UK decided to stop dealing with 500s

"many British gangsters stored their spoils in the form of €500 notes. While £1m weighs 50kg in £20 notes, the same value weighs only 2.2kg in €500 notes. This has made life easier for a growing number of criminals, since the euro's introduction in 2002. Should you wish, for example, you can swallow €150,000 in €500 notes, or hide €20,000 of them a cigarette packet"

[0]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/goodbye-to-the-no...

«Swiss 1,000-franc note here to stay, says national bank. Switzerland vows to keep world’s most valuable single-denomination note despite ECB moves to pull its €500 note to help fight crime and terrorism.»

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss-...

Fr. 1000 is around $1000. I got my car in exchange for fifteen of these purple beauties five years ago.

Now let's see if the 1000 CHF note is still here to stay (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss-...). I assume that the 1000 CHF note is only sort of useful, because you can't launder it nearly as easily. With a 500 Euro note, you can spread them around and deposit them in many countries. With a pile of 1000 CHF notes, someone is going to notice.

Supposedly they were nicknamed 'Bin Ladens' in some places, due to the association with money laundering. I have no idea how true that is.

Something we do actually know, though, is that Osama himself had two of them sewn into his clothing at the time of his death.

The €500 note was one of the world's most valuable banknotes. There's no denomination anywhere near it for, say, dollars or pounds or whatever.

In Canada, when I needed over a $1,000 to pay my dentist I happily carried a $1,000 note.

Of course, I had to order it from my bank and wait until the next time they had money being shipped in. It's a happy memory that I can never repeat, because the $1,000 bills are no longer made here: (or in the U.S.)Although we haven't declared war on drugs we do have concerns about crime.

From Wikipedia:

> The Serious Organised Crime Agency claimed that "90% of all €500 notes sold in the UK are in the hands of organised

crime", revealed during an eight-month analysis. Seems like the mere existence of the 500 euro notes and those stupid enough to use them presents a pretty good profiling opportunity.

The ECB is most probably one of the biggest threats to freedom that we currently face.