EU moving towards total monetary surveillance and banning all anonymous payments

Anonymity is important for various reasons. You can't predict everything bad a government will try to do to stifle freedom that a person may want to avoid. Off the top of my head, I could see someone trying to pay for an abortion or something like that in a southern state where it's illegal, for health reasons to save their own life.

To me the problem is that you wouldn't be able to buy a car anonymously anymore, while it leaves the really rich pretty much untouched.

Art is a well known angle for money laundering or giving someone a huge sum of money pretty much without any regulation. Contracts for construction or even consulting are another way.

I don't have access to this kind of playground - chances are, you neither. But the people supposedly targeted by this kind of law (corrupt politicians, organised crime, ...), do have access to these things and are therefore not impacted.

I use Monero for donations too on a regular basis. From what I understand, the people accepting donations would no longer be allowed to sell them to professional platforms (silly as those are the ones KYCing).

Let's say you have political beliefs and would like to donate to such causes, March against genocide, stand with local essential workers, union fee. Some places like Hungary might be very dangerous if everyone knows what you spend money on.

"It's not about me so I don't care"

Principles

You don't need it right up until you need it.

Depending how inflation goes €3k limit will soon be in the territory of regular smartphone price or any slightly more expensive household purchase. AFAIK €1k 3 decades ago would be about €3k now.

That is assuming no one tries to push the limits lower, which is almost guaranteed to happen.

Well I'm not in the EU, but in my situation I live in a shithole in the US called Tennessee. I have cancer that can be removed, but I don't have the quarter of a million for the surgery. It's been impossible to get a surgeon to even look at me, 2 years looking and still no surgeons will even let me in their office.

I need medications but the med I need the most is $8000 a month, it suppresses my autoimmune system and alows me to heal. My cancer is vary rare, it's called a neuroendocrine tumor, it's caused by extreme stress, this is because I'm a natural born empath, but saying that out loud usually gets a knife in my back from anyone near me carrying dark energy.

But to get to the point, I can get some meds occasionally for cheap, as long as they're sold for cash, but if that gos away then I definitely will die much faster. Seems on par for the life I've lived, care about everyone, then have everyone try to kill me.

• tacking of payments gives those in power (banks, [bad] governments,...) Mechanism to completely profile and manipulate you. Your spendings says EVERYTHING about you. You might not care because you're living in peaceful and stable (e.g. not in economic crisis like Venezuela) times, but the world and many governments are visibly changing for the worst. It gives them unlimited power to introduce any kind of taxes and fines or means of blocking you from moving away with your money to somewhere else. You don't agree? They can still get to your money.
• limiting cash or anynomous payments takes away your financial freedom and strongly increases your dependency on banks. Banks put limits on your money that you can't fully control, they block your transactions for whatever they find suspicous. They can charge you whatever they want. There's a lot of corruption and money laundering with banks, that are the the most regulated institutions in the world ( except for armies probably), proving that even with a lot of control and legislation, those in power can still do whatever the fuck they want. Banks also take risks with your money and there have been crisises caused by them before. Most of them invest in oil, war and other ventures that are profitable for them. They manipulate markets for profit and for the worse of the common man. There's a lot you can read about those things. Becoming so strongly dependant on banks give governments limitless power on what to do with your money and block it whenever they want. Truckers protested against government in Canada => bank accounts blocked.

Whether or not some or all of these examples matter to you, one thing you have to understand and always defend is: you are the boss of your of money. Your ownership and control over your money is evenly linked to how much freedom you have.

Another thing you also have to understand, even if you think full visibility and control for governments is a good thing to solve crime, corruption and/or money laundering: there are and have ALWAYS been black markets. And the worse countries are off, the stronger these markets become.

There isn't really. Most people are unaware that most crash transactions and withdrawals anywhere close to those amounts will almost always have to be reported to the government of whatever country you're in. But, you know, EU bad....

There's no wholesome reason to need 10k in cash. Even the examples here of paying for an abortion is a problem with reproductive freedom and not cash. You're not suddenly going to get away with it because you "sneakily" withdrew 10s of 000s in cash, right before you travelled to a state where abortion was legal. Political donations can be made in small, repeated sums. Specifically, as they dont sell large value items.

Unless you're a hired assassin, a paedophile network, a corrupt politican or a drug cartel it's not going to effect your business.

In reality, most of the nay sayers are people who take cash payments for the work they do to avoid paying the taxes the rest of us have to pay, for the things we all use.