> nothing stops them from raiding your home and confiscating your physical cash

Yes and no. I'm in Canada, so maybe the protests in Ottawa, which were mentioned above, are a good example to use.

It actually is much simpler for the Canadian federal government to just lock your bank account, than it is to raid a person's home and confiscate their cash. Entry to a person's home, or detaining them, invokes the entire set of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure and arrest. (And for complex, mostly stupid IMO reasons, your bank account does not.)

We do still have due process, judicial review, etc. If you were targeted during the protests without reason, and got a lawyer, you'd probably ultimately get the controls on your bank account lifted. But... you'd need to speak to a lawyer. And that requires some travel or an active phone plan. And that's where cash might actually help a lot.

There's also the question of scale. It costs a lot more, takes a lot more effort, to physically search for cash than to simply flip a bit in a database. Bank freezing can be done and applied at scale automatically, in a way that physical detention cannot. I do agree it is basically tending in an authoritarian direction. I'm worried about it and I'm not sure how we can and should fix it.

Yes, they can always stuff you into a cage when they catch you. That doesn't mean we should live in a cage full-time. As I and the sibling comment said, let's not make it easy for them. The USSR did break up, and tyrannical governments get overthrown - but that's going to be a lot harder to do if state repression becomes more efficient and easy.

What a weird argument. I guess you also don't use encryption ever because authoritarian governments can just extort the keys from you. Somehow I doubt you grew up in an USSR country or ever cared about the life back then in more detail

I use encryption to prevent criminals from stealing my data. Not because I'm afraid that my government might turn tyrannical.

Give it a couple more years.

You can't stop them, but you can make it more expensive.

>And nothing stops them from raiding your home and confiscating your physical cash as well.

Nobody can confiscate what they dont know you have. You are making a case not to put all your eggs in your home.