Image source: pixabay - megspl
The Australian government has introduced an economy-wide cash payment limit of $10,000 to keep dishonest tradies and businesses from rorting the system by taking cash in hand, as reported on news.com.au - Frank Chung. Their primary aim is to cut down cash payments to the use of less than 100 $100 notes to curb with the "black economy".
The "black economy" refers to undocumented payments mostly done in cash to avoid scrutiny of tax agencies. Cash payments provide an untraceable means of transactions, mainly unaccounted purchases. While many could see such a decision as a harsh one, it has done nothing good for smaller businesses and daily transactions.
“This will be bad news for criminal gangs, terrorists and those who are just trying to cheat on their tax or get a discount for letting someone else cheat on their tax,” Mr Morrison said in his Budget speech. “It’s not clever. It’s not OK. It’s a crime.”
Source: news.com.au - Frank Chung
Image source: pixabay - jarmoluk
Shift toward electronic payment options
Australia's big step in promoting cashless payment follows suit of China's cashless revolution. Not only to combat counterfeit paper notes, China's Alipay and Wechat Pay are changing the way daily transactions are performed. Alipay and Tenpay dominate with 54 percent and 40 percent market share of mobile payments, respectively, as well as 30.7 percent and 22.2 percent of other online transactions in China (source: Post Magazine - Zigor Aldama).
Apple Pay and Goldman Sachs may be working toward creating an Apple Pay-branded credit card. Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier this year said, “I’m hoping that I’m still going to be alive to see the elimination of money,” as reported on ComputerWorld - Johnny Evans. As with electronic payments, cryptocurrency or not, blockchain may be the best solution in the future.
Image source: pixabay - annca
Adoption of Bitcoin in Australia
Travelbybit.com is one of Australia's crypto payment platforms that accept Bitcoin, Litecoin and NEM (coming soon). Co-founder of Travel By Bit, Caleb Yeoh, said that their company has over 150 business signed up for crypto payments across Australia (source: news.com.au - Jason Murphy). The transparency of the blockchain is bringing transactions into a public ledger that assists governmental monitoring.
There are still conflicting views about transparency and privacy. Governments are expected to be as transparent as possible, whereas citizens want their privacy respected. In terms of monetary transactions, Bitcoin and other blockchain based technologies have varying levels of privacy. Monero, for example, is a cryptocurrency focused on the privacy of their transactions. There is hence a limit as to how much governments can monitor.
