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
Will it be inflation adjusted?
If inflation continues (financial repression to reduce debt and mitigate the aging population makes that likely), that 3000€ will soon be 1500€ in today’s money and you won’t even be able to by a mid range laptop with cash in 10 years.
At the current official 2.5% inflation it’ll happen anyway after 28 years.
It’s basically a cash ban over the next decades. Great news in the current private surveillance economy.
Belgium, France, and Spain all have had cash limits of €3k, €3k, and €1k respectively for some time now. And the US has a variety of reporting triggers set at $10k. None of those limits have been inflation adjusted. So indeed more and more people become subject to unwarranted surveillance as time moves further beyond 1984.
But then consider Germany. Germans are wise enough to understand what they give up when giving up cash, so while the EU law has little effect on Belgium, France, & Spain, Germans are getting fucked by the EU on this and AFAIK there is no inflation adjustment at the EU level either.
It’s a shit law but if we must have it I would like to see it indexed to postage costs, which has been going up by leaps and bounds. The cost of printing a page at the library has gone from 5¢ to 10¢ in the past year… so that would be a good inflation index for this as well.
Germans might legitimately riot if cash is straight up outlawed, so that’s why polticians have to resort to underhanded tactics like this.
Personally, I think barrels of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup is the best inflation proxy, mostly because it’s really funny:
And that’s while top EU officials are still not being elected, and are in fact personally mostly shitty people and most likely very corrupt and with solid background of being in bed with dictatorships and cleptocracies.
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Just let terrorists do the transactions so you can follow their cash flow. This is only hurting people who need to make some large down payment legitimately and now have to jump through hoops.
This is only hurting people who need to make some large down payment legitimately
Yes, this is intended
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
Thanks for the link.
It’s important to note that chat control keeps getting reincarnated. So it’s an on-going fight.
Seems like this is not an interesting topic to most of the voters. Based on the pirate party blog post this was already put in place mid march, way before the EU election days in june. Seems this did not leave an impact on most people, which will hardly ever handle that much cash anyway.
In Canada etransfers are usually limited to $3k/day. On big invoices I get paid over multiple days. It’s not that big a deal for me. I think people look at it like they can only get robbed of 3 grand a day.
The medicines or sex toys I buy is nobody’s business.
Google wants to know, Facebook wants to know, your government wants to know, your bank wants to know. And they harvest enough data about you to actually know.
That 3.000€ sex toy 😋
It will also strip dignity and autonomy from non-criminal adults, you nannying assholes!
They are not assholes. They are in fact very smart and steadily moving towards their goal.
They are reducing applicability and efficiency of the means they themselves don’t need. Their crimes are done the old-fashioned way, plus when you are a high-ranking official or a businessman or a politician, who’ll even try to investigate you if you’ve done nothing clearly wrong?
By the way, I’m not saying it’s a sign of some USSR 2.0 . Rather mafia becoming stronger. Well, look which people hold high posts in EU institutions. They are almost openly mafia tools.
They are not assholes. They are in fact very smart and steadily moving towards their goal.
They are reducing applicability and efficiency of the means they themselves don’t need.
You just described people looking after the interests of number 1 at the expense of others. We call them “assholes”. That’s the appropriate term for what you describe.
(btw, this is orthogonal to intelligence… there are smart assholes and there are stupid assholes).
O-okay, but then it’s too weak a word.
<citation needed>
Citation for what?
You’re going pretty far calling all(?) influential EU politicians “mafia tools” whose deeds will not be investigated. I see that there’s a certain lobbyist influence and surely a bunch of other corruption, affecting a number of politicians. But there’s a lot less actual mafia influence and scandals are in fact uncovered regularly.
UvdL is an obvious mafia tool, Borrell too, Ylva Johansson is connected to a few things with clearly negative effect, that chat control of theirs included, and Kaja Kallas is a not too remote relative of Anton Vaino, who is the head of Russia’s AP, and I’ve read they are not on bad terms.
But there’s a lot less actual mafia influence and scandals are in fact uncovered regularly.
Which would make sense with more mafia influence, not less.
I am still unclear on your definition of mafia. Do you count every lobbyist as “mafia”?
But there’s a lot less actual mafia influence and scandals are in fact uncovered regularly.
Which would make sense with more mafia influence, not less.
I’ll try to illustrate what I mean and I’ll also use examples of how the term “mafia” is usually used:
- In Italy, the Italian mafia, while still strong, has been getting weaker because connections were uncovered and legal cases were won.
- In Germany, the Italian mafia has been getting stronger because a lot of politicians thought that it’s not an issue if there are more Italian restaurants and more Italians owning homes, even though both are connected to mafia money.
Prosecution usually means the judicial system is working. E.g., OLAF prosecuting the head of Frontex is imo a good sign, not a bad one. (Also, no, that guy isn’t “mafia”, he’s just corrupt.)
No, I count Ilham Aliyev and Anton Vaino and Putin and Lukashenko as mafia. For European politicians connected to them - in the general meaning of the word, as in abusing their posts to help criminals kill people. For example, in Artsakh.
Italian mafia I actually consider beneficial against such people.
Tax evasion and money laundering rob all of us. I don’t like that we have to do this but it’s a necessary change.
This is stupid, money in that range is irrelevant on a national scale. The real laundering and robbing happens in the millions and billions and is committed by people in suits gifting each other yachts and real estate.
Ultra rich don’t evade taxes, they avoid them via good accountants legally. What this is supposed to prevent is small/medium tax fraud which really adds up.
But as @somguy69 said, money laundering is not committed by the middle and lower classes. Using anti-terror tools against someone who neglects to declare some small income. It’s absurdly disproportionate and takes our option to be free from banks away. It’s a terrible trade-off.
3k EUR is not small income.
I’m not even sure what we’re trading it for. Illusion of privacy from your own state?
Considering $us 1 has about the same spending power as €1, €3k covers room and board in Utrecht (the cheapest indexed city in NL) for about ~11 days:
https://aoprals.state.gov/web920/per_diem_action.asp?MenuHide=1&CountryCode=1101
And min wage is set at €2150 (take-home pay, so likely ~€3k gross). So yes, ⅓ of a month.
It’s a show stopper for me. I will not work for that amount because it’s a small fraction of my market value. That nixes Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. I’m fine with tax declarations so the real limit for me working in the EU is the €10k limit. But that’s still a pay cut. And it limits me to Germany and perhaps a few other countries. So working full-time in Europe has essentially become a non-starter for me.
I’m not even sure what we’re trading it for. Illusion of privacy from your own state?
Reread the thread. Privacy from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare, Paypal/Zittle, JP Morgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard, the telecoms, countless payment processors, as well as unwarranted gov. snooping.
And that just touches on the confidentiality aspect of privacy. Yet privacy is actually more about control.
Can you rent a flat anonymously? Doesn’t that have to be reported for tax anyway? All of examples I’m seeing here are flat out tax fraud heaven.
Can you rent a flat anonymously?
I would hope so, as far as the EU goes. If the EU were to force leases to be registered and to name all occupants, it would be absurdly over interventionalist and it would be a blatant privacy abuse. Belgium requires leases to be registered but then the registration process makes email address a required field. So if someone does not have an email address registration is not possible (despite registration being a legal obligation – would be interesting to see what happens in court when someone is prosecuted for not registering due to not having an email address). Apart from that, there is no rule that all occupants must be listed on the lease. And cash rent payments are legal.
It would also be surprisingly extreme if hotels were forced to collect identities of their guests. They likely do it anyway to know who to go after for damages, but a gov mandate would be excessively interventionalist.
I don’t know what those numbers are supposed to be used for, but they are certainly not to be used for estimating cost of living.
Per diem is an estimate of room and board, so indeed it’s a city-specific measure of cost of living. The minimum wage figures are a nationwide amount that doesn’t deviate too far from cost of living (targets a “living wage”), but it obviously has the bluntness of being fixed nationwide. But as you can see from the per diem variations, there are vast differences from one city to the next. The min wage is likely above living wages in Utrecht, but below living wages in Amsterdam.
Do not forget “art”.
Should go after them too, no?
10k maximum means everything above 10k. 1 million is still above 10k.
Yes, it doesn’t affect asset donations, but just because it’s not a theft-ending law doesn’t make it useless.
While the limits are way too low imo, i agree that there is a need of sorts. Whoever i think any legislation like this should cone AFTER we have taken care of the major offenders. The order is just wrong.
It like allocating police resources to illegal lemonade stands while there is a mass murder running through town, killing someone every hour.
No it’s not. The real money laundering is happening in the area of billions and we lose billions by companies not paying taxes. The normal people here don’t matter at all. 3k is tiny, that’s less than my gaming PC costs if I want to sell it used. Wtf
Ultra rich should be taxed up to their tits or ears but let’s not kid ourselves that 3k/10k EUR limit is going to affect anyone poor.
10k is the price of a used car so it affects almost everyone. And with inflation the limit will go even lower over time. Its a bad plan all around, and gives more power to states which are already too powerful.
Have you ever bought a car? You can’t do it anonymously, you have to register it.
Criminals make most of their money from drugs. And most law enforcement resources are allocated to fighting drugs.
It’s our failed “war on drugs” that is creating a rich criminal class in society.
Legalize and regulate drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling and then there won’t be a huge criminal economy. What remains can then be easily squashed by law enforcement.
I wasn’t talking about war on drugs, those should be decriminalized anyway.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only. It’s obvious why.
Tax evasion is a thing, yes. But it’s also relatively easy to prosecute by auditing.
Money laundering requires a source of illegal money. And, what you may not realize, money laundering schemes always pay tax. They actually overpay taxes by faking non-existent economic activity in order to make the illegal money legal.
Take away the source of illegal money and money laundering disappears.
How are you going to audit cashless businesses that invoice one price and take another and how much is that going to cost? We’re talking about likely widespread issue that needs solving systemically, not with adhoc actions.
Dude, tax collection has been optimized for hundreds of years before we even had electronic money.
They even got Al Capone.
Money laundering is the opposite of tax evasion. If you don’t understand that those two things are not the same, then I can’t really help you.
All of you guys focus on some billionaires, mafia bosses etc but we’re talking about 3k/10k EUR limits.
I’m asking how do you audit cash-heavy businesses doing petty tax fraud cost effectively?
You weren’t asking anything. You were just lumping things together.
To audit tax fraud, just audit the books. If a restaurant is full on a Friday night, but the books show few sales, then you have your evidence.
If someone buys a new car and has a nice house, but claims their business is hardly making profit, then the tax authority can demand they explain the source of their income.
Again, this is how they got Al Capone 100 years ago.
Money laundering is much more difficult and it’s the opposite. Because the laundering restaurant can just write in the books that they sold 100 more cocktails on a Friday night, paid by cash. And they also pay the required tax on it.
To combat money laundering, you need to audit the customers of the establishment, which is why they want to reduce the usage of cash.
But instead of turning the EU into East Germany, we should just stop criminalizing vices and regulate that, which is the main source of dirty money.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only.
Belgium solved that last year by simply forcing all traders to accept electronic payment (in addition to cash). They cannot refuse electronic payment.
It’s an EU-wide thing now I think. Our car shops just say they can lower the price significantly if you pay by cash. Others just play dumb.
Our car shops just say they can lower the price significantly if you pay by cash.
Rightfully so. When telecoms and train travel vendors give discounts for paying online, it rewards consumers who are on the unethical side of the #warOnCash and rewards discrimination against the unbanked and punishes the poor. The elitist idea of discounting electronic payment harms everyone by promoting Bill Gates’ war on cash. Visa’s $10k incentive for merchants to refuse cash rewards the practice of excluding people and attacks privacy and autonomy. Whereas cash discounts encourage consumers to carry cash and to use it to support a system of inclusion, which is needed to show merchants on the edge of introducing exclusion that cash acceptance is important.
I think you’re on some ideological crusade, I’m more into pragmatism.
Prices should be the same regardless of the payment method, but let’s not pretend the “discount” you get when paying cash is anything but tax evasion.
Prices should be the same regardless of the payment method
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
― Desmond Tutu
but let’s not pretend the “discount” you get when paying cash is anything but tax evasion.
Let’s not pretend Visa, Mastercard, and American Express give free service to merchants. Let’s not pretend the costs of loss of business when a card fails, or the equipment malfunctions is zero. Let’s not pretend there is zero value in having cash to facilitate situations where wait staff shares their tips with the kitchen staff¹, or that having petty cash on-hand is not useful for small incidental costs. Let’s not pretend the transactions a company does is not sensitive information and that data brokers selling that info to competitors is free of detriment.
¹ I recently asked a restaurant for cash back. They said in principle they are willing to give cash back, but so few customers pay in cash that they often cannot share their (presumably electronic) tips with the kitchen staff. Their problem (as I see it) is they gave no incentive to pay with cash.
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This is about the EU. Prostitution is not criminalized.
Money laundering has the opposite effect that you think it does. Money laundering takes untaxed money and puts it through a process that results in tax revenue. The /absence/ of money laundering “robs” us, if it’s tax revenue that you have in mind.
The lazy AML enforcement style is what robs us, and it robs us of privacy, dignity, and autonomy. If they would enforce AML the same way they enforce other crimes (getting proper search warrants that respects our human rights when suspicion warrants it), AML would be enforced without collateral damage to law-abiding people.
Enforcement of tax evasion would be a petty cause to use as an excuse to force every single person in the land to patronize commercial banks. Like subjecting everyone to facial recognition and tracking just to make the work of a few shoplifters harder. It’s disproportionate and undermines our freedom because law enforcement wants their job to be easy. We lose our autonomy and options so law enforcement can have a bit of occupational convenience. Which amounts to nothing because criminals will simply tweak their operation.
Our boycott rights have been lost
We have just lost the option to boycott banks in Europe. Banks that:
- finance fossil fuels
- invest in private prisons
- donate to the campaigns of right-wing politicians
- snoop on us
- force us to register for mobile phone service
- force us to share our mobile number with them
- force us to supply an email address (then they use MS Outlook themselves so MS can see where we bank)
- force us to use their shitty dodgy closed-source smartphone apps
- and force distribution through Google Playstore so Google can also see where we bank
- block Tor users from their website (thus violating data minimisation principles when collecting IP addresses), then at the same time charge an unreasonable fee to offline customers blocked from their website who request paper statements
- discriminate against people on the basis of national origin
- lock us out of our money for frivilous reasons like:
- forgetting to give them an updated ID card copy the instant before it expires
- block us from donating to Wikileaks.
- set withdrawal limits in a protectionist tactic against runs on the bank
- subject us to negative interest rates
- deploy ATM machines that lie to us
We should have a right to decide whether to enter the private marketplace and patronise a business, especially a shitty industry like banking. We should have a right to boycott bad businesses. In the EU, that right has been lost. It’s a profoundly foolish trade to give up boycott rights so tax evaders have to work a little harder to dodge the auditors. Losing our right to boycott then has the consequence that banks can become even more enshitified because they need not earn our business. The banks can piss on us all they want if we are forced to lick their boots.
It’s a perversely stupid compromise of agency over our own lawful lives in order to make law enforcement a little more convenient and crime a little more inconvenient. To slightly give the cats a bit more advantage in the cat-mouse game at the cost of our liberties.
There are some parallels to the profoundly naive efforts to ban encryption or impose master keys. They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.
Well, most of the EU citizens (most of Western Europeans in fact) had that weird idea that they’d found the third way, where everything is regulated and a honest man has nothing to hide, but somehow this won’t be abused by mafia and big businesses and such.
They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.
No, they obviously want those autonomy, dignity and privacy themselves. This is the goal.
It’s a very slow and steady mafia takeover.
At this point everyone should start considering cryptocurrencies as a replacement
Get lost with your ponzi scheme. Cryptocurrencies are a scam.
Bitcoin is 15 years old alredy. Ethereum is 8.
All code is open source, rules are clear, I don’t know how can you repeat the scam accusations after all that time
Most cryptocurrency transactions are public information.
Monero is an exception.
True, but there’s no tie between your identity and your address. That should be good enough for most cases
Bitcoin doesn’t give AF. It’s your fucking money. Send it where you want. Bitcoin won’t stop you. And nobody can make it. 15 years without a single hour of downtime or any government being able to control it.
- I am not encouraging you to break the law. Don’t break the law.
Yeah, I love when my money changes its value by 20% every week. Makes spending it soooo easy.
Bitcoin transactions are public. Anyone can view your transaction history if they know your wallet address. It’s not a good option for privacy.
Also, it’s not true that it hasn’t seen downtime. It has happened at least once in its early days due to a bug. Also, there has been many times where it taken more than an hour between blocks. This is more to its probabilistic nature.
Anyone can view your transaction history if they know your wallet address
Not true with lightning. Lighting transactions are known only to the sender, recipient, and any intermediary routing nodes, not the entire world. Even on main chain, You can make as many addresses as you want and achieve significant privacy/anonymity using techniques like coinjoin.
Also, it’s not true that it hasn’t seen downtime. It has happened at least once in its early days due to a bug.
Maybe in the first year or two of operation, but it’s been more stable than my bank, my internet connection, or the credit card processors, all of whom have had major outages since then. Which is 10+ years.
Also, there has been many times where it taken more than an hour between blocks. This is more to its probabilistic nature.
Two hours but 99% of the time the next block comes in 10 minutes. Still faster and cheaper than a bank wire or other common payment scenarios. Lightning wouldn’t be effected by this. This happens less often as the network grows and stability of hashpower increases. If you need speed, you use lightning, not main chain.
Bitcoin doesn’t scale well, and also requires network connectivity.
I wonder whether we’ll ever be able to create a decentralized money system which would work over floppinets (figurative, USB sticks would do too, the point is not having good internet connectivity or any at all) and not be built on competitive wasting of computational resources.
You can’t solve double spend problem off-line, it’s just not possible - at best you can use secure element chips to prevent copying and tampering, but this isn’t a reliable solution.
In practice, at least merchant has to be on-line - otherwise your payment is only as good as your word
Yes, this part is similar to paper checks. I agree.
There may be a solution to spamming double spends - similar to existing f2f systems.
Lightning scales very well. Your information is outdated. A single bitcoin transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have trillions of transactions in a lightning channel between you and anybody else with a lightning wallet. All settle instantly for pennies in fees. They literally happen in under a second. In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. Lightning is decentralized and trustless, just like Bitcoin.
No matter how you slice it: market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, value of transactions, etc. Bitcoin is on a 15-year trend of growth on average.
Lightning relies on bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t scale well architecturally.
No matter how you slice it: market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, value of transactions, etc. Bitcoin is on a 15-year trend of growth on average.
I’ll slice it in energy waste and most of the network being controlled by big pools.
This is a discussion which has happened many times with the same end result. This architecture is not satisfactory.
And you have not answered to this:
And also requires network connectivity.
It may have eluded you, but cash doesn’t.
And this:
I wonder whether we’ll ever be able to create a decentralized money system which would work over floppinets (figurative, USB sticks would do too, the point is not having good internet connectivity or any at all) and not be built on competitive wasting of computational resources.
Is what we need if we want a system that may ever be in competition to interest of nation-states.
Lightning scales very well.
Except when you need to get new liquidity.
I tried opening incoming liquidity channel with phoenix wallet and it asked me to pay equivalent of 80USD for 1000USD of incoming liquidity.
This is unreliable because during congestion users can’t open new channels. Theres simply not enough base layer capacity to address high traffic scenario.
Bitcoin is not cash…
