What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?
Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?
UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.
I am saying that cash payments are not significantly more private than bank card payments. What you do with that information is up to you.
They are. when I pay using a bank card many informations are shared with “partners”. With cash I don’t have to give my name to anyone.
You pull money from an ATM which scans the serials and associates them with you. You spend that bill at a shop which brings them to the bank at the end of the day where the serial is collected. So there is the information that you visited a particular shop at a particular day and bought something there.
This can be crosscorrelated with information from a dozen other sources. That infomation will practically never be used to you advantage.
easy, go at an ATM, get 20$ bills, and then ask people (friends, cashier etc) to change it for smaller or larger bills
That assumes that notes spent at a store are kept and never reused; that’s simply not true. If you buy a €5 coffee with a €5 note and then later in the day someone buys a €3 muffin with a €10 note, your €5 note is given to them as change. Repeat that process in a town or city and that cash gets pretty shuffled quite quickly.
Your scenario doesn’t also take into account till “float” where a portion of cash is kept in the till/store/elsewhere to seed the till the next morning for the first customers of the day, should they need change for their purchases.