[lrvick]

> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.

For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.

Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.

Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?

[jodrellblank]

Why would it be virtually impossible for a bank to put an OCR camera on a bill counting machine?

I didn’t mean the state tracking you, I meant the bank doing it so they can sell the data behind the scenes for the usual marketing reasons.

[lrvick]

A bank knowing what bills were issued at an ATM is not the same thing as someone being able to tell which vending machine I put it into with good cross indexing to know which bill purchased which thing, as is the case with centralized credit card networks.