These laws aren't about limiting crime, or even about surveillance or tax compliance really. They're about ensuring that you cannot do business with peers and can only do it with corporations.
Log in to internet banking, ask the seller for their account, enter the number, press send.
It's even less effort than pulling cash, and only vaguely more easily traceable.
Will humans ever learn? All evidence I've seen is that they are determined to not.
For the regular person, there is no issue here. Cash is still fine, anonymous payments are possible.
Anonymous online / digital payments seems to exclusively facilitate crime, but doesn’t seem to be relevant to regular ‘normal’ people.
I think banning anonymous crypto payments is therefore a good thing.
The vast majority of people shopping online do so with their identity known and that’s totally OK (and required when buying physical stuff)
A ton of people will probably want to point out at this point that banks and merchants sell their customer data and their shopping behavior, which to me is absolute bonkers and immoral. However that’s a different issue, one that is only fixed with legislation, which makes it a political topic.
Anonymous crypto payments may also help specific dissidents in certain countries but that upside doesn’t justify the enormous downside.
How so and is there anything to back that up or is that just a gut feeling?
I pay for my VPN subscription online, anonymously using crypto. Am I facilitating crime?
No, and you'll continue to be able to do so under the new regulation unless I'm missing something.
That said, one of my gripes with a lot of this cryptostuff is that people want it to both be recognized as real money, but also not be beholden to any regulation they don't like. Can't have both.
Or you could ID and pay directly.
Sure, it's more complicated than just outright banning any type of anonymous payment, but I think not even trying would amount to a huge loss of resiliency for any democracy.
We also don't blanket ban secure private communications (although not for a lack of trying) for the same reason.
If every government guaranteed an online payment system that 100% worked for all legal purposes, you'd have point. There's no such thing. The entire digital payment system is left to private feudal lords to control as they please.
> And anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers (hosted wallets) will be prohibited even for minimum amounts without a threshold.
Doesn't this mean that literally all anonymous crypto transactions would be banned?
The strictness of AML/KYC is half the reason why it's easier to use crypto than banking. They're removing the glitch.
Also, if you have any common sense you have to do business with the corp anyway to do your withdrawal.
I can see how it would be annoying when a lumberjack in British Columbia wants to sell his truck for a mattress full of dollars, but in the real world the money was already in a bank, so not doing business with that bank wasn't an option anyway.
The consequences of KYC are way worse than that. You have to interact with someone in power when you make a payment, thats the bad part. Cause that someone now have a good occasion to hurt you (racism, discrimination, political opposition, wars, etc).
Im speaking from experience here. Moreover the rich and powerful makes payments the way they want lets not fool ourselves.
Now granted they catch some dirty shit with KYC but we'd like to see some report on the extent of that at least.
It was a web survey with fairly low numbers: 30,317 in total, which is very little for all of the EU.[1]
And of course the results of this will be biased towards people who object to this. If there had been a meaningful number of respondents then it might be a signal of sorts, but as it stands with 28,784 people protesting this is completely meaningless. You can find those numbers on almost any proposal.
Never mind the responses are almost exclusively from France, Germany, and Austria. All of Ireland is represented by just 14 people. Netherlands 26. Etc.
> According to an ECB survey up to 10% of citizens use cash even for amounts greater than 10.000 € (e.g. buying cars)
I can't find this survey. I can find some ECB surveys about cash, but nothing that confirms this. The phrasing "up to" makes me suspicious, especially since the previous claim is already a misrepresentation.
Also note that buying a car is rarely anonymous as it is, because registration and/or insurance is usually mandatory. I don't think there are EU members where this is not the case?
[1]: https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2017-07/st...
And it also means I can't really trust this person, because if he's misrepresenting this, then what else is he misrepresenting? ---
For what it's worth, personally I don't really object to reasonably limits but feel this should be up to the member states and not the EU, so I would object to this EU law. Ireland already has the requirement for a check for cash payments over €10k for example. That seems fine to me.
When it comes to laws details matter, as the recent Irish referenda showed. Not many people really objected to the general idea of the thing, but they did against the specifics. The specifics for what makes sense can differ per member state, and opinions differ quite a lot by member state as well. What makes sense in Germany may not make sense in Bulgaria.
You own nothing and you will be happy.
I can imagine dozens of good use cases for <€5000 anonymous payments, but not many above that.
If there's real demand for it, I think we should come up with a technical solution that e.g. provides one-sided privacy like GNU Taler (taxation usually happens at the payee level, so the payer can usually remain anonymous; the same applies to things like terror financing etc).
AML is a very convinient tool for anyone who wants to abuse power.
India: India throws another opposition leader in jail as elections loom https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/03/22/india-throws-anoth... from The Economist
Hungary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53093117
Plus Russia
Plus various African countries
Etc.
40 years ago Canada got rid of the $1000 and $500 note. In all that time, the idea of bringing the $500 back has never been floated.
Yet soon, $100 will be worth $20 back then. I already find myself using $100s all the time, I used to fill my car for $25 in the 80s, now it's $80. Groceries are the same, I used to buy $30 per week, now it's over $100.
As time progresses, you'll have to carry a briefcase to buy gas or groceries.
So 5000 may seem like a good limit, but in 20 years you may not be able to buy groceries, or get gas, or buy a computer with cash or record keeping.
I always pay cash for my hardware. I don't need the store to link my serial number to my credit card number. I'm already using MAC addresses off of old ISA NIC cards.
And yes the limit on 3k/10k seems low
Don't get me started on the times I've tried to pay by card and it just doesn't work, forcing me to always have cash on me if I don't want to skip lunch. Banks aren't much help either, with their daily withdrawal limits that make it a chore to access your own money in full. Here's what I think could help:
1. Make it mandatory for all transactions to accept card payments, no matter how small. If a card gets declined for no good reason, that meal or service should be free.
2. Banks should give 24/7 access to our money. Fail to provide that, and they should owe us big time, like 1 million euros big.
3. If authorities mistakenly place a distress or freeze on your assets without just cause, the compensation should be tenfold the standard rate—meaning 10 million euros. This ensures accountability and fairness in financial dealings.
3a. Any compensation due for mistakes, such as wrongful distress on assets, should be personally paid by the government employee responsible for the error, not sourced from government funds. This would promote diligence and personal accountability in official actions.
Maybe it sounds extreme, but something's got to give for a cashless society to work here.
First I wanted to write that good luck suing you government, and even if you win, getting your money in several years… Maybe…
> personally paid by the government employee responsible
… but then I continued to read, and I’m sorry but if you think any government would be willing to do that, you might be mistaken or even delusional.
The sad truth is that as a layperson you can’t do much about it, if anything at all. And no government will be willing to let you hold it accountable in any way for even the smallest amount of money, let alone millions like you suggest.
The question is about fairness. You work for these money, did not steal them. If you steal, the court can decide to take them from you, but mistakes happen and you know that you have some X amount of money, go to the grocery store and boom-you have nothing. No court, no police, no judge. And then you must go to court and write tens of pages of proofs to get your own money, not my or their, YOUR OWN! I am starting to become a bit angry exactly because this happened to me. They saw the mistake, and unlocked the money in about 2 business days, but the block was put friday evening, so 2 business days was 5 real days for me.
I know the benefits of cards and things, i like how I don't have to count coins but there must be some balance.
Currently it's like the DMCA thing. I can right now just send youtube few DMCAs for few random videos I choose. If they even come to me and tell me that I am lying, i can tell - "sry, my bad, won't happen again for the next few weeks" and i'm fine. The difference is that this can have more real and immediate consequences. What if you're in another city and have no where to sleep except hotel, and suddenly you have no money for hotel. You have no money to get a ticket to go home. And no food? You may carry some cash of course - 20-30 euro? Most of the hotels are 50-60 euro (unless its a real hole). And then what?
This is not some joke torrent site where we play pirates vs Big Corps. This is real life. Last such example was in Canada where many protesters found out that their cards were frozen. I can't remember the exact time or what they protested against but i'm sure you also heard of that.
What I don't understand though is why are "they" doing it, tightening things up for laypeople. It's not like most people in Europe are rampant criminals and money launderers, or even rich. Real criminals use different multiple schemes too. Why does government there want more control, exactly? What they don't see yet, but want to see that bad? I don't get what's the point, but maybe I'm just not very bright.
It prevents crimes as long as the people who would be committing them know it’s hard to cash out. As a simple example, phone theft was much worse in the United States a decade or so back because a teenager could grab a phone, wipe it, and get hundreds of USD. It plummeted once the stolen IMEI database went into effect because nobody buys a phone which can’t get service. It didn’t have to go to zero to be worth doing – just getting the easy money guys out often makes a big difference.
Sure, but "follow the money" can be an incredibly powerful tool for criminal investigations.
> With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.
That's a concern I definitely share. I think there needs to be a push for a privacy-preserving middle ground between the complete two-sided anonymity of cash and some cryptocurrencies on one side, and the data privacy nightmare that's traditional electronic payment methods.
I paid 6 million in cash for my scooter, and you can imagine what that looked like. Upshot is I felt very rich and like one of those fellas in those rap videos throwing around money.
I friend lent me $2000 back in the day, so I went to the bank, and got 400 $5 bills. It actually felt empowering, and my friend even had a great time of it.
Yet it wasn't $6M, which just feels like a big number... no matter what the currency.
There was some discussion around the turn of the century that the introduction of the 200/500 Euro notes might impact the USD's status as the dominant "notes in a coffee can buried in the yard" store of wealth for the developing world, but it never went anywhere.
It is interesting that this seems to be a remarkable amount of faith in inflation being a managed slow-walk-- if you had Weimar-style inflation, any fixed limit would be blown through in weeks. Although, perhaps that's a secondary objective there-- if an economy with high paper-trail requirements starts to overheat, pinching the monitoring system might provide additional leverage.
What logically follows is that the it should be codified that the limit should be raised periodically (yearly?) based on the inflation rate.
Getting gas at night in rural parts of the US without a credit or debit card is already practically impossible – there's nobody there to take your cash. Card-only restaurants, vending machines, shops etc. are already a reality in some countries as well.
I think we urgently need a semi-anonymous, cash-like alternative for low-value online and offline payments, because I feel like once we've lost the anonymity of cash completely, there's no way it'll be reintroduced in a digital equivalent.
The discussion around this seems largely poisoned though, with a lot of vocal crypto/libertarian takes on one side (often tangling the payment privacy aspect with monetary policy), and "nothing to hide, log everything, credit cards and ACH are perfection" on the other.