cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11683880
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11683421
The EU has quietly imposed cash limits EU-wide:
- €3k limit on anonymous payments
- €10k limit regardless (link which also lists state-by-state limits).
From the jailed¹ article:
An EU-wide maximum limit of €10 000 is set for cash payments, which will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money.
It will also strip dignity and autonomy from non-criminal adults, you nannying assholes!
In addition, according to the provisional agreement, obliged entities will need to identify and verify the identity of a person who carries out an occasional transaction in cash between €3 000 and €10 000.
The hunt for “money launderers” and “terrorists” is not likely meaningfully facilitated by depriving the privacy of people involved in small €3k transactions. It’s a bogus excuse for empowering a police surveillance state. It’s a shame how quietly this apparently happened. No news or chatter about it.
¹ the EU’s own website is an exclusive privacy-abusing Cloudflare site inaccessible several demographics of people. Sad that we need to rely on the website of a US library to get equitable access to official EU communication.
update
The Pirate party’s reaction is spot on. They also point out that cryptocurrency is affected. Which in the end amounts to forced banking.
#warOnCash
The war on cash is a war on privacy.
Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home
EU. It’s the EU, not Europe.
Fixed
The European Union is not synonymous to Europe.
Use Monero, use Monero, use Monero.
No.
This is why you’ll have no privacy when cash is gone.
If cash stops existing in my lifetime and I have shit to buy privately, I might consider alternatives like monero. Until then, I‘ll avoid making crypto investors richer, thanks.
Supposedly this legislation also bans anonymous cryptocurrency.
Like that’s ever stopped torrenting or Tor.
Only to so called “hosted/custodial wallets” aka crypto banks or custodial exchanges. Non-custodial wallets/exchanges or p2p transactions are unaffected, because they’re impossible to stop or trace. Businesses accepting private crypto currencies should not be affected as long as they accept direct payments like MullvadVPN does.
Better but still pretty bad, in that case can only hope the software/trading ecosystems for p2p improve enough to be more generally viable and that once that happens there won’t be reactive legislation to stamp it out.
The one currency to rule them all.
“Cash is outlawed. Let’s use a Ponzi scheme instead.”
Hmm, you know what? Somehow I think the solution is neither of those things.
I don’t think you know what a ponzi scheme is. A ponzi scheme is a situation where a business pays it’s previous investors with the money from it’s new investors… In a fairly launched crypto currency there is no business or other central entity distributing the coins so there is nothing to invest in and no one to pay you back. The only think you can “invest” in is the network itself and the only thing you can “invest” is the work of your computer to secure the network for which you will be rewarded with some coins. Every other good store of value in the world works the same. In order to obtain gold or silver you have to pointlessly dig in the ground searching for some useless metal whose only worth comes from it’s scarcity and being difficult to obtain. In that sense if crypto currencies are a ponzi scheme then so are silver, gold, diamonds, €/$/£ (paper or digital), stocks and everything else whose value doesn’t come from it’s intrinsic qualities.
If you don’t want to dig in the ground/use your computers work you can pay someone else to do it or just buy the metal/coin from them if they already acquired it. But if it’s so useless why would anyone spend their time, effort or intrinsically valuable things (like food, fuel, tools etc.) to acquire it? Because while it’s basic qualities don’t make it a good source of energy, food, heat, light, shelter, security, comfort, entertainment… non of the things we as humans value, they do make it an ideal candidate for a store of value a unit of account and a medium of exchange. That’s why people valued this metals for millennia and continue to do so. They don’t have value on their own, but in the context of the societal system we live in their intrinsic qualities make them invaluable. The value of gold, cash etc. came from it’s place in that system, crypto currencies are in many aspects an improvement on those intrinsic qualities that make gold and cash valuable so it’s only natural that they will replace the aforementioned in many areas of life.
Ok limiting anonymous cash payments is bad for privacy but wtf is limiting cash payments altogether???
How will they enforce it? I’m sure big/medium businesses will comply, but how can you track a cash transaction between private citizens?
Furthermore in the country where I live (Italy, one of EU founding members) more than 60% of independent professionals (partite iva) evade/elude taxes in some way or another, and it’s very common (so common that every Italian experienced it many times in their lives, me included) for small businesses and professionals to offer you a slight discount if you pay cash under the table (no receipt, so no taxes) and, even if we have an entire police force dedicated to financial crimes, the submerged economy is just so big that they can’t deal with it now, imagine when they’ll have to arrest/fine everybody that accepts more than €3000 in cash.
What somebody writes on a piece of paper and what happens in the real world are 2 very distinct things, many stores in Italy don’t accept credit cards even if it’s against them law, and only a minuscule fraction of them gets fined.
The EU has extremely nazi-esque control on the private financial life of its citizens (the state monitors your bank account, to open a bank account you need to give every info about u in the future they’ll ask for your DNA probably, if you withdraw/deposit a “suspect” amount of money our IRS will come after your ass, ane you need to prove your innocence basically guilty untill proven otherwise, ecc, there are a thousand examples, I’m sure EU citizens can relate) but I can’t see how they’ll be able to track pieces of paper.
TLDR I can’t even see how they will be able to enforce this law, especially when we talk about small businesses/independent contractors, and the situation gets even funnier when its a transaction between 2 private individuals.
I’ve worked in many EU countries and the feeling I often got is that in Italy, we are more advanced in fighting tax evasion and elusion.
Keep in mind that in switzerland for example there is no cap to cash transaction
In Germany and Austria often is difficult to pay with card because they don’t accept it
I’ve seen Russian in Vienna going to luxury stores with literally stacks of money
How will they enforce it? I’m sure big/medium businesses will comply, but how can you track a cash transaction between private citizens?
Because that is not the point of the laws.
Infact the NL implementation of the laws specifically says it is for business to business and business to consumer.
There is no mention of private transactions.The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.
This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.
The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.
The point for me is that the government automatically seems to think that cash payments are for something illegal. And all of a sudden, the burden is on me to proof that it is not.
While technically speaking, paying with cash is a very legal way to pay and should not require any explanation at all. Nor should it be more difficult.
Of course, there is a limit, and I get that paying a 2 million dollar house in cash is reason to at least ask where that money came from. But 3000 dollars or 100000 are amounts of money that in my opinion do not deserve the same amount of checking.
A lot of random but legal stuff can be done with 10000 dollars of cash. And yes, sometimes you use cash because you don’t want your identity known. Doesn’t mean you are doing something illegal. If the government thinks it is illegal, they should open an investigation and proof it.
Instead they put the burden on you. Doesn’t seem fair to me, and a limitation on my personal freedom to spend money however I like.
Not to mention, even things that are legal now, could be made illegal by governments to come, and dictators or oppressive regimes will have no problems with checking logs to see which assholes did something that goes against their values in the past. For that reason alone, governments should only be tracking the minimum amount of information they need.
Money laundering is a real issue so I understand why they would like to do something like this. Having read through the comments here I can see that a lot of people are opposed but I don’t really get why.
Welcome to the communist Europe! This is what the friendly left got us.
sees capitalism capitalisming capitalistly What is this, communism?
This has nothing to do with communism or capitalism. They are economic systems and nothing more. It has everything to do with authoratarianism which is economic agnostic.
Were fighting the wrong fight here people
