Cash is basically illegal for many transactions related to financial services and is likely to become illegal for everything greater than $10k in Australia very soon:
Australia and India are among those who bought (no pun intended) into the fallacy that cash is for criminals, and you're only a good consumer if you use traceable electronic funds from megacorp SIBs.
There are millions, if not billions, of unbanked people whose survival depends on cash.
And the US has civil asset forfeiture, were cops call "dibs" on cash and the owner has to essentially disprove a negative they're using it for a legal purpose in order to recover it.
This happened to my friend, he was caught with a small amount of marijuana and cocaine in his house while police were there for an unrelated domestic dispute. They then searched the rest of his house and stole approx $10k cash he had in a safe, accusing him of making that money from drug sales (it was really just emergency cash he wanted separate from his bank account, he wasn’t a drug dealer). He never got it back, it was not even in the record of items police seized.
Australia doesn't have many people that are "unbanked". AUSTRAC already requires notification of any transfer over AUD10K.
India has managed to get a large proportion of their population into the "banked" column by introducing a cheap/easy mechanism for people to store and forward their money. Whether that is also related to the "fallacy that cash is for criminals" is orthogonal to the desirable situation that even the poorest can have a bank account.
Bank accounts allow people to store their funds safely (or at least as safe as the banking regulators), it allows them to receive and send their money much more easily, which allows them greater involvement in the economy.
Australia has a few, large ("too big to fail") banks and government benefits are paid direct to bank accounts. Banks are required to offer basic/fee-free accounts and only require KYC ("100 point") ID checks to open. No one uses cheques/checks.
Basically, the US banking system is 3rd world and so distributed in terms of both the size of banks (state banks are too small, federal are too big) and regulation (50 state regulators as well as all the feds).
FedNow will hopefully start to fix this by replacing the clunky ACH and move the US to a modern EU/CA/AU/NZ/UK type banking system.
It'd help if the US used the USPS to deliver a basic banking service that is zero-fee. It would also help if the US had both an EFT debit card system that wasn't tied to the Visa/MC duopoly and merchants were forced to go to Chip+PIN, not the ridiculous Chip+Signature that is as far as they've got so far.
It would be to the distinct advantage of the majority of the US's "unbanked" population if they could have a cheap/zero-cost banking solution.
All of that is orthogonal to your worries about "fallacies" about cash and the fear of civil forfeiture. In fact, on that last item, it would be much harder for the average local police force to forfeit someone's bank account than it is for them to seize physical cash, requiring a warrant as well as working through a bank's own legal and other departments.
> Cash is basically illegal for many transactions related to financial services and is likely to become illegal for everything greater than $10k in Australia very soon:
That's irrelevant. My main point is you appear to not want the traditional "bank account" product, but rather a "secure storage" project. I provided an example of the latter from my jurisdiction, but that was only an example.
https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy/...