In the US, there's not a right to privacy, or at best it's complicated. At least federalists or conservatives endlessly argue that doesn't exist, for reasons that I don't understand. If we had a right to privacy in the US, it probably wouldn't protect criminal communications, and the potential of illegal behavior is used as the justification for all kinds of quasi illegal investigations.

What about banning end-to-end encryption while keeping client-server encryption (like Telegram or Apple does)? If people are not allowed to transfer money anonymously, why allow them communicate anonymously?

People are allowed to transfer money anonymously, vis-a-vis cash. Banks belonging to the Federal Reserve system are of course subject to a number of arbitrary regulations that are certainly debatable, but also not outside the realm of ordinary government regulation of interstate/international commerce.

Wholesale banning of anonymous money transfers would also, in my opinion, be a violation of 1st and 4th amendments. But banning encrypted speech & communication altogether (or compelling an open-access backdoor) is clearly a violation of 1st & 4th amendment.

Most of the world already has a "interaction between a natural person and the government is subject to formal identification with government-issued documentation", the US could indeed go that route if they wanted. Nobody could feasibly ban private anonymous communication, though.

it wouldn't be too terribly hard to make "cash" less anonymous, for instance, serial number scanners in cash registers - like banks have those safes that are computer controlled and pop out the exact bills and counts you request, just replace all cash registers with either cashless self checkout or those vault style dispensers and receivers. If every point-of-sale has the serial scanner, cash is now no longer anonymous. They'll know who got it, and if someone else gets it scanned then they know that there's a link between you and that person.

there's already enough cameras to capture every angle - including the ones at registers that clearly are there just to capture your face.

The only reason i can see for a cashless society is: someone is going to make shedloads of money on the microtransactions. Visa, MC, AmEx, JP Morgan, etc.

> If people are not allowed to transfer money anonymously, why allow them communicate anonymously?

You can do that in the US though with cash. There might be some transactions that you can't do in physical cash but that is more of a practical/convince limitation and not a legal one.

That cash will not be anonymous for long once you deposit it, between mandatory reporting and serial number records.