This doesn’t seem that much worse than American rules that have already been in place for a long, long time.
As it is, large payments or withdrawals must be reported to federal agencies, anything over $10k. This applies to cash transactions as well and the forms the IRS requires you to fill in a $10k+ cash transaction can be found here.
The biggest difference would be the impact on cash transactions and crypto transactions in the EU.
I’m pro-privacy, but a lot more crypto facilitates crime than not, so I don’t really know why people would be shocked that governments would attack crypto specifically here (literally almost all ransomware uses crypto). Looks like way more of a crackdown on crypto than cash, but maybe that’s just me.
And the USA system is bullshit and I’m against it.
Here in Germany Cash payments for houses are a great way of laundering money for the mafia. Similar roles have als been proposed a while ago
Still not a good enough reason to reduce the privacy and freedom of any citizen. I don’t care if the mob uses cash, let the police track the serial numbers of their cash if they catch them doing crimes or whatever. The mob isn’t my problem, but losing freedom is bad for every citizen.
The mob isn’t your problem unless you live in a society shaped heavily by them. In that case, this act has more pros than cons
Italian here. Our right wing government who blinks an eye to all small entrepreneur in Italy (there are A TON here) recently increased the max cash payment from 2k to 5k. This is definitely a way to say “please be free to recycle a bit more oney” and to gain votes in exchange.
It’s incredible how Germany, Austria, or Switzerland to name a few have this crazy high cash payment.
In fact our “ndrangheta” for example (Mafia from Calabria) expanded a lot in Germany due to this.
Italian here too. It’s sad how the EU has to make us do the smart things as we are incapable of them
Just because one country has it doesn’t mean another should adopt it
This doesn’t seem that much worse than American rules that have already been in place for a long, long time.
Do you really want to be like the US, though? I think maybe that’s not a great idea. (Source: am from US)
So a ban on crypto and CCP like control over all finances?
Are you seriously suggesting me to contact my MEP based on the clickbait title you’ve written? Wow.
Grab #Monero
So that you can’t sell later ?
Monero is like an unregulated stock. If you want to use it for a purchase, you want to wait until as late as possible to actually purchase any.
A better strategy for staying private would just be hoarding money under your bed.
Yeah, lose all your money so you don’t have to worry about it being surveilled!
More than 97% of monero buyers are in profit right now. Nobody on earth lost more than 10% buying monero
Do you see the irony of people treating a cryptocurrency in name as a cryptostock in reality?
that nostr link doesn’t load for me but this is the url that post in the screenshot is ultimately linking to: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eu-cash-cap-and-ban-on-anonymous-crypto-payments-results-in-financial-paternalism/
So, Europe limiting people’s freedom, even more. Why am I not surprised? Use Monero and build the circular economy. Give the middle finger to these clowns. People in the US need to do the same thing because we are headed down the same path. That’s why I always suggest if you have Monero not turning it back into Fiat ever.
You obviously didn’t read it. This is specifically targeting businesses, not individuals, so you’ll still be able to use Monero and whatnot to buy stuff from companies, they just need to have their crypto wallets at a custodian (presumably for tax transparency). Likewise with cash transactions, large transactions are rare and unnecessary between businesses.
If that is actually the case, the crypto portion is at least not that bad. The 10k limit on cash transactions is just not feasible in some industries though.
Yeach im most worried about used car market. Thats the only place that i know of where large amounts of cash is exchanged most often.
I’m pretty sure this is business to business, not customer to business. So you could still buy that €11k car, the bank would just need to deposit it instead of handing that €11k to the wholesaler in cash (they’d need to use a bank transfer for that).
I could be wrong though, it just depends on what “business transactions” means. Is it only B2B, or B2C counts too?
Use Monero, burn the planet, don’t buy anything useful with it as it can be made illegal after one legislation and don’t forget to actively swap it between 10 other different cryptocurrencies. Also thanks to Microsoft for hosting Monero official source code repository.
burn the planet
How much energy does it take to run the banking sector?
don’t buy anything useful with it as it can be made illegal after one legislation
Yeah, good luck with that. It’s censorship resistant. So that legislation doesn’t fucking matter.
actively swap it between 10 other different cryptocurrencies
Funny as most stuff can be purchased in Monero without swapping.
Also thanks to Microsoft for hosting Monero official source code repository.
which could be easily changed at any time.
Also thanks to Microsoft for hosting Monero official source code repository.
which could be easily changed at any time.
Not just that. Git would let the devs know if the repository contents were maliciously changed.
Please do remember that the banking industry provides banking for the entire world, instead of ~ten thousand people. It does cost a lot of energy, yes, but the energy per person is far less than with any cryptocurrency.
The point of crypto is for everybody on earth to be their own bank and be part of the financial system, which is something the banks cannot do.Also, the bank’s banking system and governments have gotten us into the situation we are in now where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. I don’t know who said it, but I heard a quote once that said something to the effect of, let me control what a man uses as money, and I care not who makes his laws.
The poor get poorer and the rich get richer because of the economical system we live under, not because of the banking industry. Crypto isn’t going to solve that.
I agree that banks are not to be trusted, but a blockchain hasn’t proven to be a safe option either.
You also just skipped over my comment. I take that means that you acknowledge that crypto is extremely wasteful and would never scale unless gigantic changes were made to how it functions?
Not at all. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer due to inflation, which is caused by government spending and central banks creating money out of nothing and saying that it has value when it does not. Not all crypto is extremely power-hungry. Take Monero, for example, as it is mined with CPUs only, which everybody has access to. If cryptocurrency mining ends up using less power than the banking system, then that is a net positive instead of a net negative. The majority of cryptocurrency losses have not been because of the blockchain, but because of services built on top of it that should not have existed to begin with, such as exchanges, lending companies, etc. When you give your crypto to somebody else, it is no longer your crypto, and that’s where people have messed up by giving their crypto to places like FTX, Mt Gox, etc. There’s also quite a lot of mistakes made with two-factor authentication via SMS which is not secure to maintain a cryptocurrency account such as Coinbase. When somebody tries to explain that you should not hold your keys on exchanges, a lot of times you get feedback about, oh, that’s too much work. Well, if you’re not going to care about your money, nobody else will. One of the big major points of crypto is to eliminate the trusted third party.
And yet most cryptocurrencies are mostly used as a investments instead of using them for their intended purpose which is transactions .
Which I agree is a problem. I don’t see them as an investment. I see them as a way to get out from under the authoritarian rule of governments. Unfortunately, we have what we call the number go up crowd and we don’t like them very well.
Monero is a terrible investment long term. Pricing is hard because the value is always changing
What do you mean? I’ve been using Monero for over a year and in that time one Monero has always equaled one Monero. /s
It’s only when you price it in fiat currency that the price changes.
How about against the price of gold? You also will see it change
True, i have never measured it against gold. Though my guess is that price action would be pretty muted since both are decently stable.
Monero is not stable
I did not say stable. I said decently stable. Since Monero is actually used as money and changes hands often, the price fluctuations do exist, but they are less than they might otherwise be. Monero took a big shock recently during the Binance de-listing and dropped 30% which lasted for all of about a week before it was back to a decent equilibrium and only a month to recover most of that loss. It has recovered 20% of the original drop, even though there are fewer people using it. Because it removed some speculation from the market. More people over time are realizing that Bitcoin is not the promise they understood it to be and are leaving for Monero.
How does Monero avoid the problem of Bitcoin? Of just being used for investment and not currency?
Monero is actually the least volatile crypto asset that is not specifically designed to be pegged to fiat.
They track the trade of art too?
How do you think they’re paying for art?
Money > Art > Suspicious business.
Suspicious business > more Art > more money.
more money.
…soooo someone paid money? Which would fall under the regulation.
NFTs invented nothing, they copied the shady scam/money-laundering business of IRL art
sorry but banning anonymous payments is pretty good for fighting corruption…
I am pretty sure the lesser part of corruption is cash. Probably more stuff like exchanging a lucrative contract for political support.
They are not stupid. Afterall cash needs to be explained, a good contract gives you cash and the explanation.
Cash is mostly traceable at point of contact unless you keep it in a money bin and don’t spend it, though…
Not necessarily, it’s only traceable if you generate receipts on both sides. I don’t know about EU law, but in the US, you only need to report cash deposits if they’re over $10k, and if your deposits are always over $10k (e.g. you’re a big retailer or something), another $10k here and there won’t raise any eyebrows.
Cash is still king when it comes to corruption since it’s easy to exchange it for favors w/o generating a receipt at all.
Can’t say in terms of proportion cash vs. non-cash but one might want to watch the Qatargate recent documentary on Arte which shows that somehow a 700k EUR luggage was found in the house of a MEP. Piles of cash sound outdated yet clearly still exist nowadays.
Geoblocked
Video, audio and subtitles via yt-dlp at https://fabien.benetou.fr/pub/home/ytdl/
I’ll leave that for few days.
The 500€ bill was removed from circulation because it was used almost exclusively for corruption and illegal trade.
Consumers payments deserves their privacy, but business ones needs absolutely to be fully traceable.
Could it be possible to use two different yet identical interchangeable currencies, one traceable for making business only, and one untraceable for consumers retail transactions?
loosely e.g.
- wages are Business currency converted and paid in Consumer currency, accounted for the amount paid to the consumer in his name
- end-users/home/consumer purchases are made from consumers anonymously in Consumer currency, and this is converted converted into Business currency upon transaction, keeping only the consumer name anonymous but tracing everything else
- B2B transactions are made in Business currency, fully traceable
… I don’t know there is probably still a loophole
After the Panama Papers and everything like it I’ve experienced in my life, I truly believe it doesn’t matter if very wealthy or powerful people are exposed on anything they do unless it involves what Epstein did. Financial crime is not generally of interest, regardless of how interesting it might be to you and me. Sure this can be used to fight corruption, but why is the system corrupt in the first place? Is this really going to be used against those corrupting influences or is it going to be used as another of the many tools in the drug war?
The solution isn’t to do nothing. This post reads like it’s not in good faith. Like it’s trying to promote giving up.
Of course. By suggesting that I don’t think this will do anything about corruption and will if anything be a tool used for corrupt purposes, I don’t mean to suggest that there is nothing to do about corruption. Even though I think the solutions to social and economic problems are rarely solved from the top down, I do think the issues can be addressed bottom up. The people have the power and it’s only by circumstance that some people appear to hold the power.
True that. The system that we have is the product of many painful lessons, taught to us by global crises and crimes. People, who oppose this system, should stop reading nonsense on reddit and 4chan, and start with books and lectures from educated economists.
Putin’s corruption works fine without anonymous payments
i mean does it really? russia is heavily sanctioned to the rest of the western world.
Putin is not Russia
so ban it only for government (people and assets) related transactions
But fighting corruption is not a goal I’m ready to pay any prize for.
I order to participate in the fight again corruption, would you mind sharing with us the list of payement you made this week? Please use the following format :
[date], [time] - [nature of the payement] - [transaction amount] - [beneficiary]One transaction per ligne, in a chronological order.
There’s a special status for some people in Russia, it’s called Foreign Agent, and I believe they need to write down everything they spend money on this way
You’ve just invented accounting haha
That’s literally what businesses do, it’s called accounting. And if you read the underlying article and/or law, you’d see that this is targeting businesses, not individuals.
i mean banks and law enforcement can already get that information, so i dont know what point you think you’re making.
Russia almost did it. Now it’s finally free of corruption!
Haha , nope. It’s way more corrupt than before. You can even purchase on the dark web a list of items your person of interest bought this year.
Corrupt politicians can simply ignore the law. If they didn’t ignore it, they wouldn’t be very corrupt.
Yes, but now there’s an explicit law over which they can be prosecuted
Good point. My statement was a bit reductive, I just worry when it comes to creating the kind of blanket ban on stuff that people can work around if they’re powerful enough.
This is not true in France. Politicians that have proven fraud are arrested and charged. In France we have Sarkozy, Cahuzac, Fillon that were all charged with crimes.
They were president, minister and presidential candidate respectively. I’d be surprised if it was different in the USA. I’m seeing that trump is also being charged, the system seems to be working.
Clickbait headline. The underlying article lists much more reasonable restrictions:
- Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions
- Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions
- Anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers will be prohibited
So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.
What’s the difference between commercial and business? I thought they were synonymous.
I think they are used synonymously in this article, but business could also mean B2B transactions, so between two businesses.
Commercial transactions - Aaah, the kind of transaction that most transactions are?
Operated by providers - Aah, so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers. This makes accepting crypto especially burdensome, which is half the point of this legislation in the first place.
Why does the government need to have every transaction reported to them? Crime is bad because it causes harm. If harm is being caused, that means a person or entity is causing that harm. That means there is evidence. Follow that. Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools than at any point in human history. We all travel with GPS monitors in our pockets. We all use credit cards instead of cash. We all are recorded by CCTV 90% of the places we go. We don’t need to give them more financial surveillance because ‘crime’.
I’m not saying these rules are perfect, but it doesn’t help if you argue against rules that don’t exist.
Commercial transactions are not “all” tx, and above 3000€ are obviously not the most common tx.
I do think the crypto restriction with no lower limit is too much, and I don’t get why they focus on non-custodial wallets, but it’s again not “all” tx.
Why does the government …
Money laundering, tax evasion and corruption are real crimes with real consequences, and knowing about the flow of money is pretty much required to be able to detect them. It’s a trade-off with privacy, so imo setting some limit for anonymous payments is the right thing to do. Idk if 3000€ is perfect, but it does seem reasonable.
Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools …
We need some amount of oversight and surveillance, so imo it’s not good enough to just exaggerate every proposal to the extreme and reject it on those grounds. These rules are not a total crackdown on anonymous payments, but they might still be too restrictive. But you kill every discussion about that if you just make up different rules entirely, instead of arguing about the rules that were actually adopted.
so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers
No, any business must use a KYC custodian for their wallets. I don’t think they’ll need to KYC their customers, they’ll just need to account for those transactions in their accounting.
So if the company accepts Monero, the Monero wallet would need to be with a custodian, but you’d be free to use Monero to buy stuff and remain anonymous. At least that’s my read.
slippery slope, dumbass
And these limits will be tied to inflation?
more reasonable restrictions:
None of that is reasonable.
That’s all pretty damn reasonable…
Unless you want to buy something with cash. Once they cross the line they won’t stop until cash and anonymity are gone
Yeah, that’s my concern as well. However, most large cash purchases are things that are tracked anyway, like vehicles, houses, etc.
Wtfff
How do you even ban anonymous crypto? It’s anonymous 😅
If you have €50,000 worth of Monero, they can’t know and won’t care. If you transfer it to someone else you’ll be under the radar. If you try to cash out your Monero, they’ll find out and you’re in deep shit. Monero is worthless to most people if you you can’t exchange for fiat.
It’s not a problem to get large sums of money out of money:
- create a foundation, allow donations, get a few donations in monero, tada
- spread it out to friends and family, let them take out the money in cash, receive money
Probably if you are able to fly to a country where there’s lax rules on crypto exchanges and residency, you can get an address there, sign up for an exchange and get the monero out in that currency. I’m sure if you asked a tax advisor how “optimize taxes” they’d give you a bunch of financial instruments to “not launder” money.
Honestly, these laws will probably mostly apply to people with large sums of money most normal people wouldn’t dream of transferring anonymously.
This is for businesses, and businesses are required to have proper accounting and audits.
I have spent €3000+ in cash a few times in the last few years but I dont really mind this tbh.
Don’t give up on your rights just because it’s easier to be lazy and not defend them. Stand for all them, whatever they might be
This feels like satire
I think people should create new and stronger communities to fight stuff like that
Topics, groups, etc, where people discuss and organize system fighting
Honestly, it’s nice to see that they included cash.
Good luck enforcing it, of course, but the traditional banking system is where the vast majority of all financial crimes occur. Which is partially what drives working class people toward alternative currencies. You want to clean up crypto? Clean up your own house first.
It’s no different than in business. You have to earn buy-in from your stakeholders. Commoners fleeing to crypto is indicative that governments haven’t earned that buy-in, and we all know why: People believe their governments serve the rich and powerful.
Meanwhile the rich will have minimal issue laundering their money regardless of which tech is used, they’ll just experience different delays and transaction fees depending on the method.
