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
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.