EU moving towards total monetary surveillance and banning all anonymous payments
EU moving towards total monetary surveillance and banning all anonymous payments
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153 comments
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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.
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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.
So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.
Unless you're using the wallet to buy or sell something. You know, the thing people use money for.
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. Nearly every category of crime, particularly violent crime, is on a decades-long downtrend. 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'.
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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 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.
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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.
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more reasonable restrictions:
None of that is reasonable.
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And these limits will be tied to inflation?
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What's the difference between commercial and business? I thought they were synonymous.
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I think they are used synonymously in this article, but business could also mean B2B transactions, so between two businesses.
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That's all pretty damn reasonable...
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Unless you want to buy something with cash. Once they cross the line they won't stop until cash and anonymity are gone
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Yeah, that's my concern as well. However, most large cash purchases are things that are tracked anyway, like vehicles, houses, etc.
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153 comments