Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.
Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.
If you want to pay large sums of money abroad in the EU, for example when buying a car, there are a few rules you need to follow. This is because many EU countries have cash limits. This means that cash payments can only be made up to a certain amount.
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.
they can overhaul it, if it becomes inconvinient due to inflation. it's however rare to pay that much in cash. most people just carry a maximum of a few hundreds in cash, so it's no big deal if they lose their wallet or it gets stolen.
most people prefer paying with debit/credit cards or similar services. it's more convenient. no counting; no chance for counterfeit money to be involved; no change; automatic records on their accounts etc.
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.
That 3.000€ sex toy 😋
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.
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.
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.
Do not forget "art".
Should go after them too, no?
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
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.
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.
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.
Bitcoin is not cash...