Your rhetoric is off, "smuggle" is the term for illegal stuff. Don't use it for legal stuff. And don't make cash money look like it's bad - that's just the propaganda that started after the Davos conference to bad mouth cash money in the interest of a small elite. We all know better: You transfer legal stuff. Cash money is valid money form, you just carry money around in your wallet. While it's already true, some state limited the amount of cash one is allowed to cross the border, another artificial limitation imposed.
I live in Italy. Nobody ever used €500 bills for anything else than crossing the Swiss border with as much cash (cash unknown to tax authorities, of course) as possible. I have never ever seen a €500 bill, and if someone has to give you, say, €1000, it will be 10 * €100 or more likely 20 * €50.
It fine and common to buy a new car from a certificated car dealer or build officially a house with cash money - it's a major legal payment option after-all.
Your experience is different, as you live in Italy which was hit especially hard by the 2008 crisis has high dept, is fighting against corruption, etc. You would need a truck for your €50 notes which makes it unreasonable.
"Smuggling", in the primary sense, is moving anything across a boundary without notifying the relevant authorities. It doesn't matter whether the stuff is generally legal or illegal; you're smuggling if you move it secretly when you weren't supposed to.
For example, it's relatively common in the US to smuggle cigarettes from an area with low cigarette taxes to an area with high cigarette taxes. The legality of conceptual cigarettes isn't at issue; what's at issue is whether the relevant taxes were paid.
I'm pretty sure that this is at least the part of what he is talking about. I'm not sure if it's fair to refer to it as a "technology", but he is basically talking about laws being even more fucked up than they were some 30 years ago, and people (say, you) accepting it as it was OK. But for him, or for me it's not OK — for us it "seems" like money (cash included) is just a handy way to exchange goods and services without carrying a cow (or a witness of me working for someone for a day) around the city. The whole purpose of money for us, as we learned while growing up, is a confirmation of us being useful to someone, a "neutral goods" so to say. So we don't feel obliged to "notify" any fucking "relevant authorities" when we move somewhere while keeping these tokens of us being useful, which are accepted somewhere else as well. We don't want to have to rely on banks and lawyers to exchange something we make by our hands to a loaf of bread.
So it's understandable that he doesn't like somebody comparing of moving something you stole to moving something you earned. For him this is nothing but one more pair of shackles people suddenly have to wear — and are putting it on happily, because it surely helps them to live more secure and blissful life, yeah.
Implies "illegal" of what? The argument was that you can't smuggle cash because cash is a legal commodity. That's nonsense; you can smuggle anything. The prototype for smuggling is smuggling legal goods so you don't have to pay import taxes. Drugs have to be smuggled because they are illegal, but the goods being illegal has nothing to do with what makes smuggling smuggling.
You are most definitely not free to just trade gold holdings for anything without disclosing it to the authorities in the US, or any other nation I know of.
That it can be done illegally, I may agree with. At that point, it's not just criminals who will steal your gold (in the sense of taking it away without compensation), but the state as well.
