Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.
"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.
> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.
For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.
Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.
Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?
A bank knowing what bills were issued at an ATM is not the same thing as someone being able to tell which vending machine I put it into with good cross indexing to know which bill purchased which thing, as is the case with centralized credit card networks.
Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.
"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/d0f4d450df96013172...
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/12/07