What is small and what is large is a matter of opinion.
If they are out to get you and can't find anything incriminating, cash will do. The press will happily report on this too : 'There was a police raid so and so, nothing was found but they found a (large) amount of cash'.
Furthermore, our government is planning legislation to make cash transactions > € 3000 illegal.
> What is small and what is large is a matter of opinion.
There's certainly there's some vagueness in the middle, for me a few hundred isn't large, but a grand is, and I don't know that everyone would agree, but I think most everyone would agree that $5 is small and $10,000 is large.
$10,000 doesn't seem particularly large. Just a few years ago, I bought an old truck for $12,000 in one hundred dollar bills.
If you're worried about large drug transactions, a kilogram of cocaine would cost around $20,000-40,000 in the USA, and significantly more in Europe (actual wholesale price for bulk purchase, not inflated police figures that price it at $150/gram).
Personally I think one month of apartment rent should not be considered a suspiciously large amount of cash, and it should be fine to buy a car from a friend using actual cash. I really don't see the downside of leaving those things legal without a threat of civil asset forfeiture.
$12,000 is an out of the ordinary large amount of money - that's why you can note it as a special instance. It's certainly not something you keep on yourself every day, right? I'm not arguing that people should be limited in what money they carry, I'm saying there is a normal range of cash, it's not as nebulous as argued.
I might not carry that much every day, or ever, but somebody somewhere in the country (probably dozens or hundreds) will have a legal reason to do so on any given day. IMO this is similar to the laws that allow prosecutors to charge (and win!) drug offenders for "distribution" for just having a large amount of a drug. There's a presumption that if you have a brick of weed, you're a drug dealer. Well, maybe, but shouldn't that have to be proven in court?
The media will sensationalize anything. Another favorite is claiming someone had "hundreds of rounds of ammunition" when even someone who just shoots recreationally, let alone competitively, would burn through that in an afternoon. It's like accusing a golfer of going through hundreds of balls at the driving range . . . yeah, that's the point of going.