Recently in a bank in central bangkok Thailand, I saw a little old lady who reached into her shopping bag and pull out bunch after bunch of neatly stacked and bundled notes. As the man behind the counter proceeded to dismantle the neat bundles and put them in the note machine counter, the old lady continued stacking more bundles on the counter.

There was over 100k USD there. No one flinched in the bank and I can only assume it was pretty normal. The lady runs a gold business in chinatown. What dawned on me tho was how long it had been since I had seen these amount a of cash. I used to manage a busy department store which we regularly had to count tens of thousands in the till. Cash = financial freedom/privacy to some extent and it seems to me we are much closer to losing it than we may realise in europe and north america.

Try banking 100k in cash in most western places and the police likely get called!!