When you say "buying a used car"... do you mean from a dealership, or from a private party? In America, I almost can't imagine buying a used car from an individual without paying them in cash. Indeed, it's one of the few situations where a large amount of cash is almost always required. It's a pain to go to the bank and get that cash. However, this is not because of tax evasion or something ... it's to avoid any sort of dispute or reversal once the sale is final. I would take Bitcoin for a car, or a check I could cash before signing over the vehicle, but I'd never take paypal or some other method where the buyer could contest the charges.
We usually use an app for that (Swish, it's kind of like Venmo I guess, developed in collaboration between the six largest banks). We don't really do transaction reversals in the same way or as commonly as in the US.
Paying for a used car in cash would actually be difficult because handling an amount greater than the equivalent of around USD $1k immediately starts tripping KYC/AML flags at any bank if you try to deposit it, and it's hard to use in day to day life because few places other than grocery stores even accept cash anymore.
Wow... depositing more than $1k would trigger AML. That's incredible. In the US it's not uncommon for contractors to pull $10k cash at the end of a week to pay their workers. Some of that may be due to tax evasion or, just as likely, the workers being in the country illegally. I suppose this is another major reason cash is still "tolerated" in the US, because the casual labor market depends so heavily on undocumented workers. No one besides a few ultra-nationalists would really want to enforce such a thing, as it would drive up construction costs. And the nationalists are paranoid and stock up on cash and gold themselves.
Honestly, that system sounds a bit Orwellian. But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?
Generally there are never any transfer fees for private individuals doing domestic transfers. The banks just provide that service for free and eat the cost. Businesses wanting to accept payments via the Swish app usually pay a flat rate of the equivalent of approximately USD $0.15 per transaction (exact terms depends on which bank you use).
It's also worth noting that credit card interchange fees are price controlled in Europe; there's a EU directive that caps the interchange fees at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Because of this, cashback on credit cards is pitiful in the EU; you can get 0.5% cashback but not much more than that.
> But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?
No, not at all. The Swish rails are free to users. But I've never had to pay any transfer fees for domestic transfers anyway. They are just much slower than using Swish (instant transfers) and much more clunky (bank account number etc. vs. phone number/QR-code).
Not every time, very certainly less than on 5% of all normal transactions, and the actual fraction will depend more on whether you count currency conversion fees and how frequently the person you are asking is buying from outside the EES.
