> And yet, that is very far from the majority.

Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?

I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.

As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?

This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.

> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.

Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.

> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.

I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.

Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.