No, they have not made a new law last week, but one of the highest courts has decided that this data should not be public (as the regulations stand, especially in relation to the GDPR). Nothing prevents the European Union institutions from updating the regulations on the subject.
...and this is what they seem to suggest in this paragraph, which is a clear reminder of this event:
> Member states should ensure that any natural or legal person that can demonstrate a legitimate interest has access to information held in the beneficial ownership registers, and such persons should include those journalists and civil society organisations that are connected with the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing.
You’ll need to explain where large amounts of cash comes from when depositing, or what it’s for when withdrawing. So in a way the burden is on whoever wants to use large amounts of cash.
Why should anyone have to prove what’s in their pocket is theirs? Why not have police question people for wearing shoes that are a little too nice or seize expensive watches?
Police actually does that here NL). If you declare hardly any income or posessions on your tax report, yet you drive some very expensive car, you may expect a visit from some fraud investigation unit.
This has proven very effective against organised crime.
They must be front line street thugs or something - any wise guy worth his weight is going to declare enough income to keep the tax authorities off his back. The rest goes into a safety deposit box someplace distant, or gets commingled into a business someplace. Escobar owned a cab company which he claimed was the source of his income - he even had a couple guys who would drive around picking up and dropping off passengers. In modern drug cartels everyone is a lottery winner - they will pay people full value to sign over lottery winnings to them just so they can report it as their source of income.
> Yeah, I am a bit worried that we may be too harsh but these laws combat real issues in our society.
Well, there are many other ways to combat these issues without treating innocent citizens as criminals unless they prove they are innocent.
Believe me, I've been on the receiving end of these laws despite never having done anything illegal, which means that my financial privacy has now been ruined several times and as a consequence, my security and safety and that of my family is now at risk, forever.
I literally have the equivalent of $1500 in my wallet right now. Why? Because I withdrew it and might end up buying something with it, either in one big purchase or ration it throughout the month.
Any country that considers that a crime or potentially a crime is dystopian. It’s insane that people think what was the typical way to pay for things a few years ago (and still is in the free world) is some vile action worthy of suspicion.
To fight organized crime by making life harder for career criminals. And yes they can and do question things which are not cash, especially expensive cars.
> Get the boot out of your mouth. If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal.
The concept of what is and isn’t “legal tender” is pretty extreme in the US compared to many other places. E.g many (most?) countries routinely takes bank notes out of circulation and make them worthless. But this isn’t so much about whether is legal tender but more about KYC laws: your €20K is no good to me as payment for a car if my bank won’t accept it in a deposit without a lot of hassle.
> Stop pretending the government (any) has the “average” man’s best interest
I like my government. I believe it operates with the best interest of the majority in mind. Why would they not? I elected them? It doesn’t consist of shadowy bureaucrats with hard- to-decide motives as far as I can see. They usually make laws with public support and have to answer when making impopular laws. The whole “governments are universally bad” thing is sad. Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
> I like my government. I believe it operates with the best interest of the majority in mind.
Yeah, I used to believe that too.
> Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
Yes, unfortunately. And that's something people learn to accept because 1) most people are not aware that governments could work better, and 2) even if they know governments could work better, it's not clear to them how to achieve that, and 3) even when there are governments that already work better, it's not easy to move to another country, be it due to friends, family, lack of jobs in your expertise, language barriers, cultural barriers, different climate, strict immigration policies, etc.
And even when you can move to another country, many countries still have most of the same underlying problems with government, because even when there is genuine interest in solving the problems (which is rare), their root causes are never actually solved (or at least, not effectively).
Adding: most “democracies” are not truly democratic - representative governments are, “proxy” or “hopeful” or “you promised!” democratic but not democratic.
Add in the layers of “manufactured consent” and you get… this to help “fight” “terrorism.”
That's not what legal tender means, and the expression "boot out of your mouth" is a new one to me. Perhaps you meant the more derogatory "foot out of your mouth"?
> If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal.
Cash being "legal tender" means that, if someone sues you and wins a judgment, you're entitled to pay the judgment in cash.
It doesn't mean that anyone willing to exchange a service or item for any random service or item is also compelled to exchange their thing for cash. If they demand a live sheep, you'll give them a live sheep or do without whatever they're offering.
Nobody is talking about being compelled to accept cash - we are talking about cash being used in a manner that is, arbitrarily illegal after a certain amount.
What were you saying "If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal" meant? The only meaning of "legal tender" is that someone with a court judgment against you can be compelled to accept legal tender. It doesn't say anything about whether it's legal for you to use it in other transactions.
“ Legal tender is anything recognized by law as a means to settle a public or private debt or meet a financial obligation, including tax payments, contracts, and legal fines or damages. The national currency is legal tender in practically every country. ”
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/legal-tender.asp
I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
I will try again:
The use of cash, if agreed upon by parties involved, is legal because it’s a government “backed”/“accepted” item of currency. Tendering cash in this transaction is legal. (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
A gov is now saying, no matter how legal the use of cash is, after a certain amount it is no longer legal.
This is, in my opinion and with my beliefs, an overreach and quite frankly nonsense. It is no surprise, but saddening all the same. That is all.
> The use of cash, if agreed upon by parties involved, is legal because it’s a government “backed”/“accepted” item of currency. Tendering cash in this transaction is legal.
This is false. You immediately provide an example that shows it's false:
> (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
The fact that cash may be provided to settle a debt, even when the creditor doesn't want it, does not mean that it's legal to transact in cash. Meth could be legal tender too, and in that case it would remain illegal to transact in meth.
> I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
As another native speaker, I'm sure you're aware that the phrase "legal tender" has no colloquial meaning or use, and while "tender" does, the colloquial meanings are restricted to senses having to do with gentleness or sensitivity to touch.
I am speaking *nothing* about compelling the use of cash between two parties.
My only and consistent point that is that it is silly for a nation to put a ceiling amount on its currency (cash) trading hands in physical meatspace form.
For the amount will stay while inflation will not and the cohort of people “bumping” into this limit will increase over time.
It’s not about compelling cash. Move away from that.
It’s about a nation limiting the amount that can be used in the “name” of “fighting terrorism.”
If stopping crime involves treating normal people (in my country they are called “innocent”) like criminals via a transaction limit that may change with a vehicle so important as cash… then the method is unjust. A nation has no right to, in the name of “fighting terrorists”, accidentally consider or treat an innocent person as a criminal.
You’re kidding, right? Average people buy cars with cash: a teen saving from first jobs for a first used car… eventually, “10k” will be where “teen” used cars land … and boom, average person.
A person with a down payment on a house.
…I can go on.
The point is this: casting this wide a net in the name of “fighting terrorists” is absolute nonsense, and not worth what would happen to a terrorist in this net: a few extra “10k money limit” charges… compared to the literal thousands of people this will inconvenience.
Anything a nation does in the name of fighting an enemy that is, in essence, a version of Lacan’s “objet petit a” - is a nation lying to its people.
It's the same in the UK, and has been for years. I'm glad there are people objecting to a limit on transactions made in physical cash, but it feels a bit ridiculous to suggest that such a limit would actually massively inconvenience people in general.
No good solution existing doesn't mean we should implement useless measures that restrict freedom.
Assuming a similar percentage of car washes and hairdressers launder money( similar to how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering) we could ban hairdressers and car washes from using cash all together. To fight corruption...
I think the problem we should fight, if any, is not the laundering. I simply can't imagine a good return on the investment in terms of fought-corruption vs permanently removed rights.
I also don't get the argument of "very few people it" against cash. Sure, the usage is low, but why would we then take away the right? To me this is like taking away the right to protest because 99% of people are almost never on the streets(made up statistic). Restrict people's bank accounts and see how quickly they will start using cash instead; I've seen this happen. Similarly, restrict people's rights and they will head for the streets.
> Assuming a similar percentage of car washes and hairdressers launder money( similar to how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering) we could ban hairdressers and car washes from using cash all together.
And how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering exactly?
On the block where I live there are a couple of hairdressers all empty and also a café owned by shady 20 year old Albanians.
A bunch of shops for construction gear where there is nobody etc. It's possible that it's a bad way to launder money but it does still exist.
Like in chess, the moves that you could play matter as much as the moves that you do play. So even if I don't need cash, I still appreciate the possibility of using cash in case my bank of government locks me out of my accounts.
For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.
I can’t imagine a car dealer who would do anything but laugh if I bought a car north of €10k and suggested I wanted to pay in cash. I’m 100% sure they’d rather not sell the car at all. Same if I privately sold a car that expensive and the buyer showed up with cash. The hassle involved with depositing and withdrawing large amounts of cash due to KYC laws already makes this a no go. And for good reason imo.
Then you have no idea what tyrannical means in practical means and are just gasping at straws.
It's not a matter of permission, nor is having a car a need or a right. Do you also find needing permission (a driver's license) to drive a car tyrannical?
Well there is no law forcing a salesperson to accept cash. So the permission here has little to do with the government.
He is no more required to accept my bag of cash as payment than he is my vintage guitar. And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
I don’t see how that’s related. It’s one thing to regulate who must and must not accept cash. E.g it’s in the interest of society to mandate important functions such as buying food is always possible with cash.
The law in the article is about a size limit for cash transactions when cash is accepted. It doesn’t have anything to do with who will or must accept cash. Only that if they do, there is a limit.
In terms of resilience to wars, disasters, power outages and similar (which is one of two arguments for cash the other being privacy), I think the key functions are probably food, fuel and similar. That car sales can continue is probably not as important.
That’s why Starbucks can probably get away with rejecting cash in Sweden but a large grocery chain probably can’t and won’t.
Sometimes, the bank won’t accept your bag of cash.
One time I was in a bank branch sorting out some matter, and I overheard a conversation between the bank staff and another customer. The customer had a bag containing $100K in cash, and wanted to deposit it into their account. The bank staff were on the phone to the bank’s security office, asking for permission to accept it. They said their cash security policy limited how much cash they were allowed to have on premises at any time, accepting this deposit would put them over that limit, so they had to get approval to exceed it before they could do so. You could tell from the tone the staff used, they didn’t appreciate this customer’s behaviour
Another time, my wife went to the bank branch, because her grandfather had sent our son $50 cash for his birthday, and she wanted to put it in his bank account. She stood in line for ages, only to then be told “I’m sorry we can’t accept any more cash deposits, someone just made a big one and now we are at the limit of cash we are allowed to hold in the branch”. My wife objected it was only $50, but the bank staff said “sorry, rules are rules”. I told her in the future, one of us should just transfer the equivalent money into his bank account from our own, and then keep the cash for ourselves
True. Although, from the government’s point of view, surely it would be better for the bank to accept a $100K deposit of dirty money and then immediately freeze it, than refuse the dirty deposit and the customer walks out with it and the government might never see it again
I suspect the people who actually try to deposit $100K in cash at a bank are probably not criminals/etc, they are just people with “more money than sense”. People with something to hide will try to avoid drawing attention to their activities, but turning up at a bank branch with that amount of cash attracts a lot of attention. And the criminals who are actually dumb enough to do that kind of thing get caught very quickly
> And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
And the "hassle" is not actually accepting cash, as that's the least of the problems. It's dealing with the risk and consequences of doing business with someone the government doesn't approve of and then getting in trouble for it (even though the car business has nothing to do with that person).
You're arguing like if the salesperson is not accepting cash out of their own free will. But you know that's not true.
Think of this as being similar to the situation where the mafia was keeping tabs on your car business and you decided to do business in a way they did not approve of. What do you think would happen? Would you say the car business isn't being forced to do business in a certain way in this situation?
> You're arguing like if the salesperson is not accepting cash out of their own free will. But you know that's not true.
Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive. A bag of cash is an expensive liability. They’d prefer I deposited the money and transfered it to them instead. Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so. But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
> Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive.
"Under AML regulations, anyone involved in vehicle sales can face significant fines and even criminal prosecution if they fail to detect money laundering. This includes law firms, banks as well as vehicle dealers—who can be any individual or business that trades vehicles or acts as an intermediary in their purchase or sale" [1]
> A bag of cash is an expensive liability.
Not as much of a liability as not selling the car. Unless, of course, the government is threatening to put you in jail, then yes, it's an expensive liability.
> Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so.
Wait, what? They don't? I've never been to such a restaurant or cafe... and I've been to dozens of countries. I've been in a few restaurants/cafes that don't accept credit cards, that's for sure (mostly because of the fees I suppose). I wonder what's going on where you live.
> But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
Perhaps you should consider living in an area with a lower risk of robbery and/or more effective police?
What you are saying here is not a problem in most of the world. And it has nothing to do with the new law we are talking about.
This is in Sweden. Cash is mostly gone. Restaurants where you eat first and pay later usually accept it reluctantly, unless they made clear up front they don’t (they have no choice then - you already ate and unlike the opposite no-card-situation where you are forced to go to an atm, you can hardly go make a deposit!). But stores, cafes etc are cashless to a large extent (but with lots of exceptions or partial exceptions e.g a grocery store might have 1 register of 10 accepting cash which means you don’t want to use cash).
Overall, the vast majority of retailers do accept cash in some form but not in usual “small transaction” situations like cafes, taxis, smaller shops.
> Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so.
Ok, so I'm curious about this place where you live where most restaurants don't accept cash, so here's a question:
Let's say you enter the restaurant, eat the food and now you owe payment, but you don't have a credit card (maybe you didn't notice the "no cash" sign).
Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts. So how can the restaurant refuse the cash?
That only seems to be legal if the customer prepays for the food, which is not what happens in most restaurants (fast food restaurants notwithstanding).
Is there a special exemption for restaurants where you live, or you don't have legal tender laws, or what's going on here?
> Ok, so I'm curious about this place where you live where most restaurants don't accept cash
This is in Sweden.
> Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts.
Yes. But those apparently aren’t absolute and non-negotiable. The Riksbank is actually concerned about this, because it’s affecting the ability for the economy to function in a crisis, as well as the ability to make anonymous transactions, so there might be changes to this coming.
But basically today no, there is nothing forcing any business to accept cash today. And as cash use dwindled, the cost of cash handling ballooned to the point where it’s worth swallowing the card fees over paying for cash management. There is also a very widespread cell phone transfer system both for free instant transfers between individuals and for payments. So it’s a widely accepted convenience. Cash is one of those systems now that everyone agrees should remain for privacy and resilience reasons but few are ready to use it. Forcing everyone to accept cash would mean having lots of cash handling expenses (cash registers etc) but still likely almost no cash in circulation. It’s part of the reason the riksbank is eying a CDBC with privacy features.
And yes if you travel to Sweden and order a meal at a restaurant you’ll probably always get away with cash if that is all you have (that is - they’d sort it out but in certain places it might be a bit awkward). But if you asked first they might say they “prefer card”. But pre-paid situations (e.g ordering a coffee to go) will often show a no cash sign.
The opposite is always true, you’ll never need cash. If you take a taxi it’s card only, nearly no transactions between individuals (used goods, babysitter, beggar(!)…) are cash either.
In total though, the death of cash isn’t that widespread 8-9 of 10 retailers still accepts cash. It’s mostly in smaller shops, cafes and similar services you don’t see it (and taxi have been cash free for more than a decade).
(In Swedish)
https://via.tt.se/pressmeddelande/9-av-10-svenska-handlare-t...
However, that a retailer accepts cash doesn’t mean it’s convenient to use. For example in a large grocery store a small
number of checkouts might accept cash meaning you’ll be waiting in line to pay with cash - so few will.
> Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive.
That is utterly ridiculous in the case of a car. If that was any concern whatsoever, then the dealer would say "let me drive you to my bank" and accept/deposit it there, which is a very, very common practice when seller is concerned with authenticity of the notes.
It's not an option in low value transactions like restaurant bills but then the risk there is low.
I know there are some places that choose not to accept cash payments to avoid cash accounting risk. That's cool, their choice I walk away... without paying them if they didn't disclose no cash policy clearly up front.
That ship has sailed long ago. I don't know any place where car ownership is not a government registry, and that is surely because the theft of them was so common that something had to be done about it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Car dealers are not the only people selling cars. Anybody who owns a car may want to sell it, and using a credit card is not an option for most private sellers. I can see why the 10k limit makes sense, but it would be dishonest to claim that it won't make private car selling a bit more complicated than it was. Escrow services will now probably pop up to facilitate private car sales, but it may be worth it.
I’d never ever use cash for a private sale - of anything — either regardless of whether it was $100 or $100k. For a large number like $10k, bank transfers work well. For smaller numbers, instant transfers are cheap and nearly 100% of people use them here (and importantly the same service - so I know I can instantly transfer $2 to anyone at any time for free).
When I place an ad to sell a used something for €50 I don’t expect to get cash for it and the seller probably isn’t expecting me to accept cash as payment either.
I haven’t used a banknote for probably 10 years now. I haven’t even seen most of the banknotes in circulation here. This isn’t all positive (for privacy and resilience in a crisis), and the fact that I wouldn’t doesn’t change the equally important fact that I want to be able to do it. And that ability is of course in peril here. But it doesn explain the situation quite well wrt to what the real impact of laws like this would be.
> Anybody who owns a car may want to sell it, and using a credit card is not an option for most private sellers
Most people use bank transfers for this kind of stuff. The seller gives you their bank account number and you put the money in it. I recently bought a new car from a dealer, and I paid my transferring money to the dealer’s bank account. The dealer took credit card for the initial $1000 deposit but not for the full amount - avoids all those merchant fees on the full amount.
Here in Australia, you can now attach your phone number to your bank account (called “PayID”), so the buyer can just go into their Internet banking app, and transfer the money to the seller’s phone number - assuming the seller has set that up. I’ve noticed a lot of people still don’t set it up, often because they just haven’t heard about it
I purchased a car that exceeded that value, in cash. The seller actually worked for a bank’s fraud department.
I didn’t do it because I store a lot of cash in hand but rather because it was a PITA to move large amounts of money with the bank that I was using. The bank wouldn’t even authorise me to transact more than €10k a day via a bank transfer.
It took me a good few hours in the bank - on calls to many departments - just to get access to my money.
I’ve since moved to one of the newer challenger banks and it has been the best decision I’ve made.
> can’t imagine a car dealer who would do anything but laugh if I bought a car north of €10k and suggested I wanted to pay in cash.
Doesn't sound like how any car salesman, or any commission salesman I've ever met thinks.
Car ownership is registered with government anyway, so it's not as if anyone can get away with pretending to be poor and owning a bunch of fancy cars anyway.
In my personal experience cash is how used car sales are done between individuals. There is sales tax on used car sales where I'm from. When the sale is agreed the seller and the buyer go to the registry. Say I'm selling you my car for 20k. You don't own the car until I sign ownership to you. I don't get any money until you hand me the cash. So safe thing to do is seller requires buyer to hand cash over and count it in front of the goverment agent. Buyer would prefer seller lie and understate sale price, but seller has no incentive to do that unless buyer gives that cash upfront. Buyer risks seller just saying "nah" and walking away with that cash. So it either requires trust, in which case no scheme the government comes up with can stop us anyway, or one party takes a serious risk, which there is strong disincentive to do.
Car has book value government agent knows anyway. Also, goverment exempts tax when seller and buyer are related. Government: "lol, you have trust, our despicable cash grab will not work here anyway so let's not bother"
So who cares here? Most big ticket property (eg. Real estate) works like this.
Some things like jewlery can slide through, but without receipts is risky crossing borders, which puts a serious damper status/utility of it, and those industries already get higher scruitiny anyway. And anyway, is it worth giving up our liberty over some tax revenue related to stuff like this?
So why prevent cash payments? The only purpose it serves it to keep the everyman under total control and open him to even more theft of savings via negative interest rates or transaction fees by financial middlemen.
> I don't get any money until you hand me the cash.
Just do a bank transfer to the individual you're buying the car off. Unless you live in a country with incredibly poor payments infrastructure, the funds will be available instantly.
You can't prove that in realtime without a trustee, which is just how things have been done forever. With all due respect, this is how it is in "advanced economies". Where are you personally from where you think anything other than cash provides instant, irreversable, and indusputable settlement in this case?
Any purchase should be possible with legal tender.
I will keep withdrawing my income in cash and inconveniencing others with cash transactions for every single purchase, including those exceeding this limit, out of principle.
Digital ledgers have proven to be unreliable. Anyone arguing otherwise hasn't witnessed bank runs, withdrawal limits, transaction limits, hyperinflation and war wiping out lifetime savings and destroying people's lives.
And you think a bag full of paper money in your basement will help you once bombs are dropped on your home town? How exactly will that help in war time more than money in your account that you can withdraw once in safety?
If you choose to deal with cash exclusively for the sake of it, so be it. But for everyone else, it’s just a less efficient way to move money from account A to account B.
Money that I have on my person, is always better than money that I cannot access.
There is usually at least a short lag between $DISASTER and $ECONOMY_COLLAPSE during which many people are happy to take cash and provide food, shelter and transport. Often you will have a steep inflation curve and rising transaction costs/exchange rates, but at least you are in control of the money that you have in your pocket.
The same cannot be said about digital money. Even though in theory you have a larger pool of places where you could spend it, money that is in your account isn't guaranteed to be accessible. Banks' infrastructure may be down, whether due to $DISASTER itself or corporate/political decision. The banks may impose withdrawal limits or a complete restriction on withdrawals and transactions. Online transactions may fail at any point in the acquirer-issuer-processor chain. ATM:s are likely to be empty.
Online transactions may be reversed. Even when you manage to "lock in" exchange rate X just before a currency's collapse in value, the merchant can and will cancel your order, make up excuses, and refund you the nominal value at the old exchange rate.
> Can't really think of any good legitimate use cases for large amounts of cash.
Affluent people tend to diversify where they keep their money. They have a few different checking accounts, savings/money-market accounts, brokerage accounts, assets, petty cash, and probably some other things. If you do not have the level of wealth that gives you the flexibility to keep large sums of money in a relatively inaccessible place (e.g. a brokerage account that might take 1-3 days to liquidate and another day to do a bank transfer), you might opt to keep a few thousand in cash in case something happens with your bank, such as your account being frozen or just drained due to fraudulent activity. It’s always prudent to keep reserves in diversified locations.
This law prohibits you from doing that without reporting it.
You'd have report that anyway, when filing your taxes, so apart from some extra admin work, that's not much of an extra hurdle, assuming it honest money.
If you receive your €10k as payment for a shipment of cocaine, you probably don't want to report it, so then you'll enter the territories of fiscal crime.
(a) payments between persons who are not acting in a professional function;
(b) payments or deposits made at the premises of credit institutions, electronic money institutions and payment institutions. [...];
(c) central banks when performing their tasks.
It's not that you would have to report it - you just cannot do it.
I want to be able to pay for at least a year of rent without relying on a bank.
I want to be able to pay for as much as possible without leaving any record with a third party if I don't want to.
I also want to be able to take all of my money out of the bank and keep it for myself, and give it to whoever I want, whenever I want, without having anyone's permission to do so, or reporting that I have done so to anyone.
Because the vast majority of people that want to do those things, are wanting to get away with doing bad things and/or not paying their way correctly in society.
You may be a rare outlier but there has to be precautions.
And someone decided once to put an explosive in their shoe, and now we all have to take our shoes off at the airport. At this rate, our future is looking extremely restricted.
This is an honest answer. Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I don't want to live in the same society as you, or be a part of one where people who share your opinion are the majority who get to make the rules.
The person I was responding to said large sums, not 10k specifically. This bill/rule thing allows member states to have an amount lower than 10k.
If there are prolonged power outages or some sort of disaster, prices will increase for food. Don't forget with the amount of inflation we have also increases prices for food.
Some people like to buy canned food or other food that lasts in bulk to get lower prices.
Australia is introducing (or may have already passed?) a similar Act with an AU $10K limit on "unapproved" cash transactions.
Over the limit you'll need approval.
Of course the usual loophole for the weathy applies, 3x $3,000 face value gold bullion coins [1] is under the cash transaction limit, although at a kilo each and ~$88K per in valuae, that's almost $300K in value technically under any travel or transaction declaration "$10K face value" limits . . .
I mean, if the thing you are trying to work around is a law preventing you from paying 300K in cash, I don't think using bullion changes much about how wealthy you are.
That reminds me of the old argument that laws prohibiting same sex marriage or prohibiting engaging in homosexual sex do not discriminate against gay people since they prohibit both gay and straight people from marrying someone of the same sex or engaging in homosexual sex.
Every time the Australian government does something authoritarian I double my Monero holdings (I'm about to have to give that strategy up :[, unfortunately). If the government starts spinning out of control to the point where people actually need to start dodging these invasive financial laws, those gold coins are going to get seized.
France requires that you declare all funds or “digital accounts” (assets, not only currencies) owned overseas, and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight, like they did in Cyrpus. The world behaves as if countries were going to seize all privately-owned assets and make you live on salary.
Well it’s not that. Everything is seized because the money in your bank isn’t technically yours. This is the same wherever in the world. However, there exists a public fund that guarantees that, in case of a bankruptcy of your bank, you’ll be compensated by this fund up to 100k€.
So it’s technically impossible to lose anything if you don’t have more than 100k€ in a checking account. Which, even if you were rich, would be a rather stupid move because you don’t earn any interest on this. If your patrimony is superior to 100k€, you probably own financial assets rather than money in your checking accounts. And since you own your financial assets and your bank is only doing the management for you, they can’t be seized because they aren’t owned by the bank.
So it’s blatantly false to say that you can be seized of anything above 100k€. You’ve got to manage your money really badly to be bitten by this.
" and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight" please give a source or at least detail the conditions it can be applied. The way you phrase it sounds like it can be completely arbitrary
Wouldn't you need to use that $3000 coin to pay $3000, ie use it for its face value, for this loophole to 'work'? In which case it would not be very useful...
If you use it to pay $88k then the transaction is obviously $88k although you've then paid in gold, not cash.
I feel that this is a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
Just hypothesizing, do not actually know if this is the mechanism, but it is entirely possible that by storing gold with a broker could allow them to access the value in order to make other investments. Essentially, having cash as collateral means having it in a bank and subject to these restrictions whereas gold in a 3rd party vault might not be but still give you the same access to credit.
Yes it’s called ‘structuring’ or smirking and is variously restricted in many places since it’s an obvious on-ramp to money laundering and tax evasion.
If I understand correctly you're saying: there is a coin that I can buy for $100,000 (because of its weight in gold) yet it is stamped with $1, which is its face value.
As such it only counts as $1, and this thus is not reportable?
> The new EU anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules will be extended to the entire crypto sector, obliging all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to conduct due diligence on their customers. This means that they will have to verify facts and information about their customers.
In Italy it is 2,000 Euro, the current governement proposal is to raise it to 5,000 and there was a lot of debates about it (according to previous measures it should have become 1,000 Euro in 2023).
Germany - I believe - has no set limit, Greece has 500 Euro.
The anti-laundering (and anti-terrorism) usefulness of limiting the amount of cash per payment has some merit, but (IMHO) it won't affect at all the illegal transactions (to evade taxes and VAT), it is news of these days of an ex-member of the EU parliament arrested in Bruxelles (in connection with presumed bribes related to the Qatar football world championship) arrested and found in possession of around 600,000 Euro cash.
I thought it was the case in France, too, but as it turns out that's the limit only when one party is a company. There's no limit for transactions between individuals (with a few exceptions).
It's a pity that the venn diagrams of people who understand the need for private money transactions and people who understand the macroeconomic need of (occasional) negative interest rates do not in practice seem to overlap.
It's a pity because we should be seeking solutions for both problems, money system allowing negative rates and private transactions. They should not exclude each other because both are important for different reasons.
all fiat currencies have number-go-down technology. look at a graph of purchasing power vs time for any fiat currency. It always trends towards zero.
start using a currency with number-go-up technology. look at a graph of bitcoin. instead of going down, the number goes up. you should adopt this type of currency.
I am aware this sounds stupid. I am also 100% convinced that it is true.
The usual argument for why negative interest rates might be needed is to prevent deflation. But in a fiat currency system like we have, it is always extremely easy for governments to reduce the value of the currency (ie, stop deflation). They can just print more money. In detail, they can just finance government expenditures with money created out of nothing, if necessary cutting taxes to provide more need for money to be created that way. This is in fact what has happened many, many times. It's not some strange fringe theory. There is no doubt whatever that it works. There is no need for negative nominal interest rates.
Here in Switzerland we used to use cash for a lot of things, I remember paying my car in cash. It has changed a lot with covid. I do not know the regulation on any limit.
My mother once told me that when they bought their first house in 1980, she had to go to the bank to withdraw the mortgage loan in cash, bicycle to another bank (or possibly the notary?) to pay for the house in cash. She was understandably nervous, carrying that much money around.
With inflation, “worker shortages”, and prices rising - 10,000 will soon become within reach for lots of normal people.
Pushing them to NEED to use a profit driven banking system. Forcing them to be tracked. To have data mined and sold. To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
GDPR isn't infallible. The EU and its individual countries have plenty of controversies.
>ton of challenger new banks.
Ton is a gross overstatement. It's a few that are truly independent from anyone else. The remainder are puppet / daughter banks.
Their existence barely influences the status quo and it certainly doesn't prevent outrage whenever banks used by over half the country's population threaten to fall.
That's what i mean, bank transactions in the SEPA space are free at the point of use. The only exception is certain banks add fees for SEPA Instant (transfer time in seconds instead of days) and fees for exchanging between currencies.
10000€ will soon be 5000€, then 2500€... make absolutely no mistake it's all about replacing cash with "Digital Euro", something the EU will have entire control on.
Usually they allow inflation to slowly bracket creep which has the same effect. For example the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 sets reporting at $10K which would be ~$80K today. I've seen legislation for fines that has built in modifiers for inflation so the government knows how account for it.
The slippery slope is, quite truly, how nation states operate. If they were worried abt terrorism, they’d stop terrorists. But this “change” … treats innocent people with the brush they use for terrorists… it’s a slippery slope by design.
Yes. Good old "look where the trend is going, foresee the risks".
Ah, remembering the surprise of upset people when they did not raise a suspect in front of bank clerks telling you "It's contactless, limited risk, 25u per transaction" (and already then the child-basic retort is "Times by how many transactions?"), and then were reached by the bank information that "owing to progress the limit is now raised to 50u / 100u / 150u ..."
> the amount you could do in a single contactless transaction
(Certainly not me: I will not accept embedded fixed NFC - not in documents, not in bank cards, not in general.)
Yes. I will rephrase: people were told, "Here are the details of the system: if anything goes wrong, it can only be for 25u". Some people trusted that as a fixed contract. Then, some received the (expectable) communications that the formerly established limit will change. Depending on the country and system, some doubled, some were raised to 150u (if I remember well), with promises to arrive soon at 500u (if I remember well).
Other details are not different in nature: if the PSD2 imposed that the via-PIN "signature" has to be provided every 5 transactions, that does not mean that at a later stage this will not be modified to 500.
The point is: if it is intrinsic to the system that the configuration can be globally changed, expect it.
About the logic: you have to foresee them "slopes", when you see they /are/ "slippery". The fallacy is in assuming the future. It is on the opposite _duly_ to consider the chances.
But I hope you realize you're citing a type of payment system being repeatedly made more convenient to support the idea of a payment system being repeatedly made less convenient. And I don't know why people would expect a security feature to never allow more.
Also is "u" standing for a specific currency, or what?
> Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict.
Russian mafia is living in billion dollar mansions all around EU in the open, with full knowledge of EU 3 letter services.
Why would anybody go for "retail" laundering when you can buy a bank for a pocket change in Cyprus?
Ways to launder money fully legally are vastly, vastly more widespread than mules with bags of cash, and are protected by connivance of Western governments.
I think another important thing to mention is that there is a regulation on centralized crypto exchanges about unhosted wallets. Therefore, this regulation is completely against defi I would say.
Fuck you god damn tyrants. They are desperate to have approval over every transaction. Set some "reasonable limit" that the sheep approve of then you can inflate it away to punish them. No wonder they're pushing inflation harder. In a year's time that limit becomes 9k.
Nothing to do with "fighting corruption" (or else a literal convicted felon wouldn't be head of ECB, - lol, lmao even) they just want to monitor you more.
There is a ton of corruption going on at much higher dollar values and governments do very little about it - corrupt businessmen tend to be the most reliable donors.
Specifically Christine Lagarde was found guilty of 'carelessly' giving a massive payout of taxpayers’ money to controversial French businessman Bernard Tapie.
Tax levels are high and tax are being collected. Governments aren't short of money because of tax evasion.
Tax evasion is not a top priority however you look at it... the argument sounds like "but think of the children" to justify things that are actually motivated by other aims and/or ideological reasons.
My country loses about €32 billions in yearly income due to tax evasion. That's the amount of money that could change many lives if used right. Instead we're cutting benefits to the poor bto reduce our deficit. Tax evasion is a top priority.
Most states are complex structures largely manipulated by a tiny number of people for the benefit of themselves and the top echelon so as to capture the vast majority of the wealth created by everyone for a minority of nonproductives whos contribution is owning things as opposed to doing useful work. Erasing every obligation they presently possess to the functional state that enabled the nonproductive to live in wealth and luxury seems like an incredibly bad idea for them and us.
Everyone deserves health care, fire suppression, police to respond to criminal behavior, courts, a national defense and a defense of democracy against terrorists and would be fascists and others who would overthrow it.
Some things like health care can be provided albeit exceptionally poorly with a ridiculously bad ROI by a mixed private / public system. Others are ridiculous to imagine. For example if you privatize the military you create a single concentration of power that could trivially be bought out by anyone wanting to shitcan democracy tomorrow.
If it were possible to effectively run a large society like that one would suppose that in thousands of years one would have been so constituted.
I do realise that. I’m not against all (or fair) taxation. I just sympathize with people who manage to get away with tax evasion.
Sentences like “the state lost €30bn of revenue because of tax evasion” rubs me the wrong way. It’s not too far off from saying “mugger lost €500 of revenue because the potential victim ran away”.
I do realise it’s a fallacy—it’s just not too far off.
It's not "not far off" It's a defective fantasy. You are part of a society entirely based on pooling money through taxation and using it to pay for the things that make your entire life possible. The only people in a position to meaningfully move the needle as far as tax evasion are the rich who overwhelmingly are the folks who benefit from tax evasion and the people most harmed by austerity are the poor who lose benefits essential to their continued existence.
Tax evasion is overwhelmingly the rich stealing from the poor.
Another solution is to just increase taxes until you end up with €32 billion in increased revenue. An advantage is also that this solution is actually _possible_ (as opposed to getting rid of all tax evasion).
But then you are just punishing those that actually pay taxes by making them pay more, while those who evade keep doing it. Also I doubt it would be possible, as raising taxes in the current economical and political climate is a political suicide.
Personally I think you just have the wrong perspective. Increasing enforcement to decrease tax evasion _is_ raising taxes. And affected groups will fight very hard against enforcement so I don't really see why you think that approach is somehow easier.
And you seem be talking about the elimination of tax evasion as if it's actually possible. Clearly it is not. The amount of tax evasion can potentially be decreased through policy and effort and we just need to decide how much we accept. Maybe the current level _is_ acceptable? In any case, some level must be acceptable. What level is acceptable to you?*
*This is a trick question. It's basically unanswerable without knowing the cost of enforcement (which increasing asymptotically as the amount of evasion goes to zero). But it is a reality that everyone should probably come to terms with.
It's a form of social credit system, china style. You cannot live without a bank account these days, but if you piss off the governemnt, they will take it away from you, like Trudeau did.
I am sure there are some benefits to living into this system, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
> This implies, no record of personal purchases around.
What's stopping peoole to do it?
I regularly pay my drinks cash.
I never paid a beer more than 10k though...
> The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
I'm glad that when I pay someone for something they can't say I didn't do it and ask for the money again.
That includes the State.
I paid my taxes, here's the proof.
I already paid my energy bill, here's the statement from the bank, have a good day.
Besides, what you are talking about has nothing to do with limits to cash transactions, I am honestly scared by the idea of going around with 10k in a bag to pay for something
only a fool or a criminal would actually do it and feel comfortable about it.
it's betting against bad luck and I an quite sure that I would not win.
Are you sure that you are going to the appointment with the seller with 12k in cash and they are not showing up with guns and rob you?
And what would you do then?
Go to the police? that first thing will do is ask you why you were going around with that much cash in a bag.
Bad question. Good question instead: "What seems to be the trend which may be at some point stop people from doing it".
> what you are talking about
You do not get the point. Of course one is glad to have the ability to prove transactions that one wants to be recorded; the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
> What seems to be the trend which may be at some point stop people from doing it
very easy answer: progress.
same reason why people don't use shells as coins anymore.
> the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
As the philosopher Jägger once said
You can't always get what you want
It's a fundamental principle of any community that ever existed, apparently in some parts of the richest World people are incapable of understanding that me is much less important than everyone.
Imagine a World where I say "I don't want to have an ID with my picture on it" but I also want to travel around the World freely, because I don't like explaining myself to random strangers in uniforms.
There are easy solutions to what you are looking for, Theodore Kaczynski is a notorious and virtuose example on how to pull it off, but none of them involve large amounts of cash spent in a single transaction, which is fishy per se because it requires two or more parties agreeing to do something that has virtually no advantage, except the most common: hiding something. I would like to understand what that something is, because the most obvious conclusion is "something shady". We all agree on that, let's be real.
I understand if protesters in HK buy tickets for the subway in cash to not get tracked by the Chinese government. Chinese are famously a little bit repressive.
I don't understand why someone in the US, living in the best and freest country in the World, the greatest democracy ever, the place where dreams come true, a Country where, unlike China, they give protesters a price in the form of a few days in jail, would like to spend large amounts of cash instead of using more modern systems to hide from their government and the IRS, two of the things that define "the most civilized place on the Planet", according to its citizens.
Something's doesn't add up here.
If it wasn't about the US, that we all know is heaven on Earth, one might be inclined to think that it's the reaction of a cynical, narcissistic, money driven, trigger-easy population to a government that has only one way to make people behave like they live in a single united Country and belong in a modern society, not tribes: violence and tyranny.
But that's obviously false for the US.
You know, as European, the many flaws of Europe are an advantage.
Even if the government wanted to track me and all my expenses, they are so incompetent that I'll probably be dead before they realize that I bough a new electric bike with my CC. I live dangerously, I know.
They point is making it hard for the tax evaders to spend their cash (which they cannot deposit in the bank since it's way more than they officially earn) in law abiding shops.
Thank you for the clarification, Ultimo (so there is at least two of us), but the rationality of the measure is still doubtful.
This starts making half-sense - it is not to curb the possibility that the merchant evades, but to hinder spending earning coming from evasion. Unfortunately, that money that may come from evasion is the same money that comes from normal earnings: so the damage is spread, not surgical. For example, now Men (is it just the two of us?) in Spain cannot purchase, say, a Macbook (the threshold there is reportedly at 999€).
It seems like one of those generalizing measures like "Populations labelled as irresponsible socially extroverts as an aggregate will have individuals bound to confinement in case of epidemic", which even when they work as an effect involve massive lateral damages.
Like for other measures, especially in the past few years, measures are taken and justified though a broad vague irrational paternalistic shout ("For the children"), and we are left with the unduly burden of trying to reconstruct the logic (if any plausible exists).
I just love how the grandstanding of European green-progressives of the past, when they positioned themselves as champions of privacy, completely flipped once they came to power.
"Name one practical reason to pay amounts higher than 1.000€ in cash." – unknown progressive
He is not. In Spain, for instance, it is already illegal to pay with cash costs above 1.000€ in any commerce. You are forced to buy it using a credit/debit card.
The limit is for a single transaction, not for your entire life.
If they can freeze your money in the bank, they can also freeze the cash you keep stashed in your room.
paranoia is stupid.
I am all in favour for protester not living tracks, it doesn't involve money transactions over 10k in cash though. I don't see how the two things relate.
The government knows that you own a motorbike, you can't go around with an unregistered vehicle, you have to sign documents that prove the transfer of ownership, you also have to pay insurance on it, it's mandatory where I live in Europe.
It makes sense: if I buy a motorbike from you using cash and nobody knows about it, when I am going to rob a bank with it, the police would come knocking at your door. Would you like that just to let me use cash instead of any other system available because we are normal people that live in societies not in a lawless imaginary city in a western movie (west was not lawless, properties where already registered 4 thousands years ago by Egyptians, it's nothing new)
Simpler yet, if the police stops you and there isn't your name on the certificate of ownership , you have to justify why is that.
Again, it makes complete sense. It could have been stolen and you could be the thief.
A washing machine costs 250 euros, you can pay it in cash.
The limit is 10k, it's 40 washing machines.
The washing machine comes with a warranty, warranty is valid only if you put your name on it.
Only a fool would renounce to 2 years warranty to pay cash and not let the government know that they do laundry, like literally everybody else, I'm quite sure the government doesn't care if you own a washing machine, but then again I live in Europe, probably the CIA does and it's a big deal there.
I really don't understand how people feel comfortable going around with thousands of euros in cash in their pockets to buy stuff that they could have comfortably and safely bought from their couch using a free and immediate bank transfer that guarantees both parties against fraud, and theft and that have no handling costs.
American paranoia about government will be the worst heritage of these last two decades.
But probably even worse is the idea that your freedom means I have to pay the price for it.
Wanna pay a house or a car in cash, without any record of the transaction?
Go buy it from a criminal, because I am not selling it to you. Nobody would. Unless they are being paid to accept all that cash in one transaction.
Your personal devices are already linked to your name.
Do you really believe you are anonymous?
SIM cards are not, for example, since forever here in Europe.
warranty certificates must contain all your personal data to be valid.
You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Why?
what's the deal with that laptop, what's the reason to keep it secret?
Suddenly your secrecy it's much more interesting for the shop owner than you paying with a bank transfer or credit card like any other person would do and not raise any suspicion.
If I was them I would alert someone, in case you'd do something illegal with it, just to be on the safe side.
See? even if you are a criminal using cash just for the sake of using cash it's stupid.
Most shops don't even accept large amount of money in cash, it's dangerous for them and costs them a lot more to handle and keep safe.
even many bank offices or postal office don't keep cash to avoid being robbed. It's for employees safety.
> Your personal devices are already linked to your name
It is hoped that nobody is so stupid to try that.
> Do you really believe you are anonymous?
I radically believe on that right of so being.
> You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Very certainly.
> Why?
Because that is what a Man does.
> what's the reason to keep it secret
Basicmost principle.
> interesting
Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting: they cannot understand. If they had been part of a Civilization, they would know that a Man does not concede on the side of privacy.
> even if you are a criminal
Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
Nothing new, it is part of the scheme: criminals have something to hide; Men have everything to hide; subjects have nothing to hide.
There are people that believe in a magical being with long blonde hair that died and resurrected 3 days later.
That doesn't make it real.
I know a few people that cannot be tracked by the usual means, you would never survive living their life.
> Basicmost principle.
I'm sure police will understand when they stop you with 15k euros in your backpack and no justification for it.
> Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting
No, they are not.
Privacy is closing the door when you go to the bathroom, what you are talking about is secrecy.
Which is why the CIA is called a secret service and not a privacy service.
To commit crimes unpunished, you need secrecy.
Interestingly, monkeys do understand that, some people don't.
> Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
It's exactly what they do. One of them bought Twitter. Another was best friend and producer of all the Hollywood celebrities. Another one won the presidential elections in the United States of A.
This doesn't apply to most EU countries. (Nuance: I'm not well versed in the legal system of countries part of the Bucharest Nine group, hence my "most")
In most of the EU, buying land and houses is done through a notary services. Depending on the country, you either do a SEPA transfer directly to the notary, and they then send it to the other party. Or, in other countries, you do the SEPA transfer to the other party, and then the notary approves the ownership-transfer once both parties confirm the money-transfer is complete.
Estate ownership is not proved by a piece of paper like with American "titles", they're backed with government-kept records, which only a notary can change. (and that's what you pay them for, in addition to taxes)
Nothing is happening in cash, because many EU governments want to be able to follow the money used to buy estate. Notaries usually report the transfer to the tax authorities. If the money cannot be justified, the notary must cancel the transaction, and some financial investigators will follow up.
There are no fees, as opposed to what many other HN commenters says. Because if your bank has fees for SEPA transfers, you can always switch to virtual-cross-EU-online banks which have no fees for SEPA transfers.
However, you will be notary fees, which most of it is just plain tax.
use of cash is not prohibited, the proposal forbids it for amount larger than 10k in a single transactions unless authorized
A notary signing an agreement between a buyer and a seller is a legitimate reason to spend all that money in cash.
Which is very rare though, I only know old cow farmers in little towns close to the mountains here that deal with much cash (for lack of near bank offices and their lack of a driving license)
Two examples from my European Country, where the practice is spread and people believe they are smart but are really not.
---
a lot of people did it here, especially in the 80s-90s. Then we started building high speed 4 lanes highways and high speed trains. You know how much the State paid for the land used to build those infrastructures?
EXACTLY!
The nominal values, so basically people got compensated for a tenth of the actual price.
The State also explained publicly that most of the land in straight flat paths, was chosen using their market value. If it's worthless, nobody will protest, on the contrary, they will be happy that someone is buying it for a price.
Some of these people were so stupid that sued the State. Of course the State won and also discovered the fraud, collecting even more money in the form of fines.
---
Recently a campaign of subsidies to improve energy efficiency of buildings was launched. The benefits are up to 110% of the total costs. Yep, 110%.
So my parents, who always did everything by the book, and got called foolish by their neighbors for years, got for free a 45k photovoltaic system and the renewal of the shed, while most of the requests were rejected because various irregularities were in place. Which again did the government a tool to investigate who committed a fraud in the past and fine them.
---
Personal advice: unless you're Bezos level rich, don't try to outmsart the government. Chances are your children will have to pay for your assholeness.
I don't think I would accept to sell my house to soneone who pretends to pay cash, I wouldn't want to deal with that much money and all the risks involved, including the fact that there's no guarantees that the money is actually not fake.
Besides, money transfer is so cheap that it hasn't been an issue since at least 30 years ago.
We are taking about Europe here.
If you knew someone who buys houses in cash, can you swear your first question would not be "where did that much money in cash comes from?"
Virtually nobody in Europe uses checks (in my country they are explicitly banned as a tender). It’s either cash or a bank transfer, and for such purchases, most people really prefer cash.
> And we’re talking about how it can impact real people here, not the 0.1% who gamble 10 years’ minimum wage at the casino in one evening
Most professional poker players are staked. They aren’t gambling with their money. It’s a job. A high risk, high reward job, but still a job. And it was just an example, and a perfectly valid at that.
if someone has 10k cash they will not buy a used car, they will buy a new car, pay it in the next 5 years 200 euros a month and then sell it to a used car reseller.
No sane minded person would sell their more than 10k worth car in cash to an unknown party who shows up with a bag full of 50 euros bills.
BTW this position comes from people who regularly see cash as a form of freedom from oppression and support the use of crypto, which is digital assets that cannot be bought in cash.
So the options are logically 2: it's people that are not right in their mind or it's people who love cash because they don't pay taxes.
10k in cash is an unreasonable amount of money for 99.999% of the population.
I am an investor in my country in bars and restaurants and we're so happy that younger generations virtually use zero cash.
It freed me and my employees from having to deal with cash, bank deposits, handling and transferring money safely, theft, counterfeit money and many many other issues that the stone age money brings.
It also made it much easier to handle payments, I can tell the bank to pay and they will, instantaneously, while before we obviously used the money from the cash register to pay, to spend the cash money and avoid going to the bank to deposit it and had to trust the delivery guy, who changed frequently, to actually not steal the money and disappear (it happened several times over the past 25 years).
It made possible for young people, especially girls, to go around safely with no money on them and still live a full life while also keeping much more control on their expenses.
There's no better way than cash for large transactions between private persons. All the apps have limits of a few thousand and bank transfers take a business day (in Switzerland). No one wants to transfer 5 figures to a random person and wait a day before taking possession of the car. Sellers don't want to give the car before the money is in their account.
So cash it is.
Used cars go for way more than 10k. I bought my current car for 35k used. If you go to used car dealer, the average price is nowhere near 10k.
> There's no better way than cash for large transactions between private persons
For small amounts? maybe.
Assuming you like bringing money with you and your time is free and you like to pay two times: the first time when you pay in cash, the second time when you have to waste time to get the money from an ATM.
There are much better ways to solve these issues and I use cash only with people I already know, other than to pay drinks and cigarettes.
For large amounts?
Absolutely not.
Unless the transaction is between two people with something to hide, of course.
Ironically, this is why Europe wanted to put a limit on cash transactions [1]
There's absolutely no obligation to pay in one transaction.
Even with raising interest rates, it's still more convenient to lend the money from the bank and pay monthly, instead of giving away 10k that could be invested in something much more profitable than a used car.
You can easily repay the loan in 5 years with < 200 euro/month even at rates around 5-6%.
> I bought my current car for 35k used.
That's a very expensive car and this [2] is 35k euros cash.
Not exactly "the best way" to pay. Honestly someone who pays a car with 35k cash, can only look like this in my mind [3]
This how I actually do it [4], paying monthly rates, very cheap interests, thanks, but no thanks.
That is a lot like asking for a form of secure end-to-end encryption which law enforcement can monitor server-side.
If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
No it really is not. E2E encryption requires this property because everything happens over a channel which everyone (or, a lot of people) can listen into and the protocol is not really based on trust. Meanwhile the financial system is entirely based on trust (between individuals, banks, individuals and institutions, etc) and people have to place their trust in someone at some point (even very rich people doing very dodgy things with their assets have to trust their bankers at e.g. - perhaps somewhat unwisely - Credit Suisse et al.)
The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules).
The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression.
> If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
I don't see how it is. This isn't about differentiating between rich and poor, nor about monitoring people becoming rich. It's about making sure that the kind of transaction that no normal person would ever do in cash, cannot be done in cash. It targets rich crooks not by identifying them, but by targeting the kind of transaction that only they would ever do.
Are you aware that millions of currency transaction reports and form 8300s are filed in the US every year and that a vanishingly small fraction of those lead to any law enforcement followup? The vast majority of economic activity including cash based economic activity is legitimate. If you want to balance the interests of law enforcement or whatever then just make it required that the transactions are reported but just banning large cash transactions will not stop money laundering and at best will just be another charge to stack on someone convicted of other crimes.
I don't see how any of that is relevant. They're not targeting the majority of economic activity, nor even the majority of cash transactions. They're only targeting cash transactions so unusually large that it's hard to imagine a legitimate purpose for them. Small cash transactions are unaffected.
> They're only targeting cash transactions so unusually large that it's hard to imagine a legitimate purpose for them.
I am saying that millions of cash transactions of this size take place every year and that the majority of them are legitimate. Whether or not you can think of reasons why people would use cash in that amount is sort of irrelevant.
Can you give me an example of a common, legitimate $10,000+ cash transaction? Elsewhere I gave the example of my mom transporting transporting a ton of money in cash for the initial down payment of a house, but that was 40 years ago. Nobody does that anymore for good reason; there are far easier, safer and more practical ways to handle that kind of transaction.
10k used to be the price of a new car, now it's the price of a used car. With a few more years of inflation, it will be the price of a used bicycle but the 10k limit will still be a 10k limit.
This is absolutely laughable. The very opposite is the case:
Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.
This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.
All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway.
> All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law.
>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.
You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.
This new EU regulation has nothing to do with preventing terrorism or money laundering, but rather paving the way for its CBDC. This is about power and surveillance.
What the hell is "freedom to pay in cash" even supposed to mean.
Why would I, a buyer, have any reason to want to receive large sums of money phisically rather than digitally if it's not for tax evasion? Having lots of money on you is dangerous and a hassle.
There's literally no good reason for this "freedom" that isn't tax evasion, money laundering or paranoid "being controlled".
It genuinely blows my mind that there are people like yourself who seem to act like they do not understand the concept of oppressive governments. It's all well and good to have this stance now, but what happens when you are the oppressed? I doubt you'd be singing the same tune
Sending or receiving money digitally generally requires entrusting that money to a bank, and some people don't trust banks or can't easily get a bank account.
The EU "government" (a non-directly elected entity) is predictably trying to enforce tax rules.
Even worse is the minimum tax on profits that targets the poorer members by removing one of the ways they can compete with bigger ones.
"...No Ireland, you're not allowed to have low taxes, we the guideposts of EU - France and Germany tax our people and companies up to 30-45%, what's that meager 10% tax you're giving them? ..."
The EU Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of 375 million eligible voters
p.s. even the US president is a non-directly elected entity
Pedantically, in the US, laws are also "written" by court precedent. Consider that prohibition was performed via a constitutional amendment yet drugs are criminalized today without amendment by the controlled substances act, itself allowed to exist due to the expansion of the commerce clause (see Gonzales v. Raich 2005). [0]
While judges in some places are directly elected, at the federal level they are not. Beyond that, enforcement of laws is at the prerogative of the executive. If the laws written by directly elected officials are ignored, that is making law as well in some sense. For instance, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but the laws are unenforced and states are legalizing it themselves (contravening federal law).
This change would affect Monero too. If you buy Monero through any sort of company that is following the law, they will have to enforce this on their customers.
What would be the point in having large amounts of valuable Monero if you could never use it properly?
As in, if you tried to buy a house, you'd still need to go through money laundering checks. You'd always be limited to small value transactions if you never wanted to pass some sort of KYC/money laundering check at some point.
By the time Madame Lagarde is done a lot of people will be praying to still have something in the bank to pay negative interest for.
With the current inflation €10.000 will be worth far less in the near future, and I'm certain the amount won't be updated yearly to account for that. This 10k "magic number" has stayed the same for a long time. This isn't about money laundering as much as about control over even relatively low value cash transactions.
Lagarde is a criminal with connections...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38369822
"A French court has found International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde guilty of negligence but did not hand down any punishment."
At least with CBDC there seems to be a way planned for anonimity:
> There are two types of retail CBDCs. They differ in how individual users access and use their currency: // Token-based retail CBDCs are accessible with private/public keys. This method of validation allows users to execute transactions anonymously // Account-based retail CBDCs require digital identification to access an account // The two types of CBDCs, wholesale and retail, are not mutually exclusive[ - i]t is possible to develop both and have them function in the same economy
Pretty important, because currently having anonymous electronic transaction is heavily difficult.
I'm pretty sure a big goal is to fight tax evasion.
I can't speak for all of EU, but here in Austria tax evasion is very common.
For example, it's still extremely common to pay contractors under the table. They will ask you if you need an invoice, and the price will be a lot lower if you don't.
Another example are restaurants. For a few years it has been required that restaurants always provide you with a receipt, but especially asian restaurants still don't do so.
All that untaxed revenue costs the state billions in missing taxes.
If you limit cash payments, then you make it at least slightly harder for someone to eg. buy a car with that untaxed money.
I really don't see any reason why you would need 10k€ cash payments if not for tax evasion.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The government of cyprus did seize bank deposits during the 2013 crisis. In some european countries i spoke to people who worried the same will have happened during the onset of covid and then the war started by russia.
I have not seen a SEPA wire transfer cost more than 1€ since SEPA wire transfers have existed. Which would make the fee at most 0.01% for >10k€ payments.
The most that I have ever payed is 1€. I have been paying 0€ for the last 5 years or so. Is that still a fee?
"Oh lultimouomo", you say, "the were transfer might be nominally free but sure having a bank has other costs involved". No fixed cost, yrgulation, so by the very fact of having a bank account, depositing money in it and taking it back by wire transfer or ATM you are never paying a fee.
Also, cash has a cost. You risk being mugged, you risk getting a wrong change by the cashier, the store risks a robbery / break in (and most often pays expensive insurance to protect itself against this)
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadDidn't they literally last week make a law to make this harder?
No longer possible for the public to learn who owns a EU company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33836543
...and this is what they seem to suggest in this paragraph, which is a clear reminder of this event:
> Member states should ensure that any natural or legal person that can demonstrate a legitimate interest has access to information held in the beneficial ownership registers, and such persons should include those journalists and civil society organisations that are connected with the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing.
This has proven very effective against organised crime.
Well, there are many other ways to combat these issues without treating innocent citizens as criminals unless they prove they are innocent.
Believe me, I've been on the receiving end of these laws despite never having done anything illegal, which means that my financial privacy has now been ruined several times and as a consequence, my security and safety and that of my family is now at risk, forever.
Any country that considers that a crime or potentially a crime is dystopian. It’s insane that people think what was the typical way to pay for things a few years ago (and still is in the free world) is some vile action worthy of suspicion.
> Any country that considers that a crime or potentially a crime is dystopian.
Then Spain and Greece meet your definition of being dystopian, as their cash payment limits are 1,000 EUR and 500 EUR respectively.
And I agree with you.
Please, don't give them more ideas.
This law makes it not fully legal tender (after amount X). It is disgusting.
Stop pretending the government (any) has the “average” man’s best interest. Stop pretending they care.
The concept of what is and isn’t “legal tender” is pretty extreme in the US compared to many other places. E.g many (most?) countries routinely takes bank notes out of circulation and make them worthless. But this isn’t so much about whether is legal tender but more about KYC laws: your €20K is no good to me as payment for a car if my bank won’t accept it in a deposit without a lot of hassle.
> Stop pretending the government (any) has the “average” man’s best interest
I like my government. I believe it operates with the best interest of the majority in mind. Why would they not? I elected them? It doesn’t consist of shadowy bureaucrats with hard- to-decide motives as far as I can see. They usually make laws with public support and have to answer when making impopular laws. The whole “governments are universally bad” thing is sad. Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
Yeah, I used to believe that too.
> Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
Yes, unfortunately. And that's something people learn to accept because 1) most people are not aware that governments could work better, and 2) even if they know governments could work better, it's not clear to them how to achieve that, and 3) even when there are governments that already work better, it's not easy to move to another country, be it due to friends, family, lack of jobs in your expertise, language barriers, cultural barriers, different climate, strict immigration policies, etc.
And even when you can move to another country, many countries still have most of the same underlying problems with government, because even when there is genuine interest in solving the problems (which is rare), their root causes are never actually solved (or at least, not effectively).
Add in the layers of “manufactured consent” and you get… this to help “fight” “terrorism.”
It is always possible I have misunderstood the point too.
Cash being "legal tender" means that, if someone sues you and wins a judgment, you're entitled to pay the judgment in cash.
It doesn't mean that anyone willing to exchange a service or item for any random service or item is also compelled to exchange their thing for cash. If they demand a live sheep, you'll give them a live sheep or do without whatever they're offering.
I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
I will try again:
The use of cash, if agreed upon by parties involved, is legal because it’s a government “backed”/“accepted” item of currency. Tendering cash in this transaction is legal. (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
A gov is now saying, no matter how legal the use of cash is, after a certain amount it is no longer legal.
This is, in my opinion and with my beliefs, an overreach and quite frankly nonsense. It is no surprise, but saddening all the same. That is all.
This is false. You immediately provide an example that shows it's false:
> (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
The fact that cash may be provided to settle a debt, even when the creditor doesn't want it, does not mean that it's legal to transact in cash. Meth could be legal tender too, and in that case it would remain illegal to transact in meth.
> I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
As another native speaker, I'm sure you're aware that the phrase "legal tender" has no colloquial meaning or use, and while "tender" does, the colloquial meanings are restricted to senses having to do with gentleness or sensitivity to touch.
My only and consistent point that is that it is silly for a nation to put a ceiling amount on its currency (cash) trading hands in physical meatspace form.
For the amount will stay while inflation will not and the cohort of people “bumping” into this limit will increase over time.
It’s not about compelling cash. Move away from that.
It’s about a nation limiting the amount that can be used in the “name” of “fighting terrorism.”
Nonsense.
"Average" people don't pay >10k€ in cash. So this measure won't hurt average people and may stop some money launderers / frauders so no issue with it.
And actually most EU countries already have lower limits.
A person with a down payment on a house.
…I can go on.
The point is this: casting this wide a net in the name of “fighting terrorists” is absolute nonsense, and not worth what would happen to a terrorist in this net: a few extra “10k money limit” charges… compared to the literal thousands of people this will inconvenience.
Anything a nation does in the name of fighting an enemy that is, in essence, a version of Lacan’s “objet petit a” - is a nation lying to its people.
ban hairdressers and car washes?
I think the problem we should fight, if any, is not the laundering. I simply can't imagine a good return on the investment in terms of fought-corruption vs permanently removed rights.
I also don't get the argument of "very few people it" against cash. Sure, the usage is low, but why would we then take away the right? To me this is like taking away the right to protest because 99% of people are almost never on the streets(made up statistic). Restrict people's bank accounts and see how quickly they will start using cash instead; I've seen this happen. Similarly, restrict people's rights and they will head for the streets.
And how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering exactly?
Things like using car washes to launder money are pretty much a dead thing because it's one of the worst ways to do it.
I have a friend who owns a laundry business and he was approached by somebody who pretty obviously wanted to buy it to … launder money.
Closest I can think of say a bar or something similarly cash heavy getting cash and paying suppliers directly. (which is in itself problematic @ tax)
For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.
Buying a car?
It's not a matter of permission, nor is having a car a need or a right. Do you also find needing permission (a driver's license) to drive a car tyrannical?
He is no more required to accept my bag of cash as payment than he is my vintage guitar. And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
The law in the article is about a size limit for cash transactions when cash is accepted. It doesn’t have anything to do with who will or must accept cash. Only that if they do, there is a limit.
And buying a car is not important?
> Only that if they do, there is a limit.
And this limit is below the value of most cars.
Which is what we were discussing in this thread.
That’s why Starbucks can probably get away with rejecting cash in Sweden but a large grocery chain probably can’t and won’t.
Whether people accept large cash payments should be entirely up to them.
> E.g it’s in the interest of society to mandate important functions such as buying food is always possible with cash.
Give it ten years.
Sometimes, the bank won’t accept your bag of cash.
One time I was in a bank branch sorting out some matter, and I overheard a conversation between the bank staff and another customer. The customer had a bag containing $100K in cash, and wanted to deposit it into their account. The bank staff were on the phone to the bank’s security office, asking for permission to accept it. They said their cash security policy limited how much cash they were allowed to have on premises at any time, accepting this deposit would put them over that limit, so they had to get approval to exceed it before they could do so. You could tell from the tone the staff used, they didn’t appreciate this customer’s behaviour
Another time, my wife went to the bank branch, because her grandfather had sent our son $50 cash for his birthday, and she wanted to put it in his bank account. She stood in line for ages, only to then be told “I’m sorry we can’t accept any more cash deposits, someone just made a big one and now we are at the limit of cash we are allowed to hold in the branch”. My wife objected it was only $50, but the bank staff said “sorry, rules are rules”. I told her in the future, one of us should just transfer the equivalent money into his bank account from our own, and then keep the cash for ourselves
Cash limits aside, They at least have legal requirements to know their customers and not blindly accept cash without any idea where it came from.
Edit: this isn’t an opinion this is a simple statement of fact.
I suspect the people who actually try to deposit $100K in cash at a bank are probably not criminals/etc, they are just people with “more money than sense”. People with something to hide will try to avoid drawing attention to their activities, but turning up at a bank branch with that amount of cash attracts a lot of attention. And the criminals who are actually dumb enough to do that kind of thing get caught very quickly
And the "hassle" is not actually accepting cash, as that's the least of the problems. It's dealing with the risk and consequences of doing business with someone the government doesn't approve of and then getting in trouble for it (even though the car business has nothing to do with that person).
You're arguing like if the salesperson is not accepting cash out of their own free will. But you know that's not true.
Think of this as being similar to the situation where the mafia was keeping tabs on your car business and you decided to do business in a way they did not approve of. What do you think would happen? Would you say the car business isn't being forced to do business in a certain way in this situation?
Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive. A bag of cash is an expensive liability. They’d prefer I deposited the money and transfered it to them instead. Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so. But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
"Under AML regulations, anyone involved in vehicle sales can face significant fines and even criminal prosecution if they fail to detect money laundering. This includes law firms, banks as well as vehicle dealers—who can be any individual or business that trades vehicles or acts as an intermediary in their purchase or sale" [1]
> A bag of cash is an expensive liability.
Not as much of a liability as not selling the car. Unless, of course, the government is threatening to put you in jail, then yes, it's an expensive liability.
> Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so.
Wait, what? They don't? I've never been to such a restaurant or cafe... and I've been to dozens of countries. I've been in a few restaurants/cafes that don't accept credit cards, that's for sure (mostly because of the fees I suppose). I wonder what's going on where you live.
> But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
Perhaps you should consider living in an area with a lower risk of robbery and/or more effective police?
What you are saying here is not a problem in most of the world. And it has nothing to do with the new law we are talking about.
[1] https://sumsub.com/blog/money-laundering-vehicles/
Overall, the vast majority of retailers do accept cash in some form but not in usual “small transaction” situations like cafes, taxis, smaller shops.
Ok, so I'm curious about this place where you live where most restaurants don't accept cash, so here's a question:
Let's say you enter the restaurant, eat the food and now you owe payment, but you don't have a credit card (maybe you didn't notice the "no cash" sign).
Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts. So how can the restaurant refuse the cash?
That only seems to be legal if the customer prepays for the food, which is not what happens in most restaurants (fast food restaurants notwithstanding).
Is there a special exemption for restaurants where you live, or you don't have legal tender laws, or what's going on here?
This is in Sweden.
> Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts.
Yes. But those apparently aren’t absolute and non-negotiable. The Riksbank is actually concerned about this, because it’s affecting the ability for the economy to function in a crisis, as well as the ability to make anonymous transactions, so there might be changes to this coming.
(In English:) https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...
But basically today no, there is nothing forcing any business to accept cash today. And as cash use dwindled, the cost of cash handling ballooned to the point where it’s worth swallowing the card fees over paying for cash management. There is also a very widespread cell phone transfer system both for free instant transfers between individuals and for payments. So it’s a widely accepted convenience. Cash is one of those systems now that everyone agrees should remain for privacy and resilience reasons but few are ready to use it. Forcing everyone to accept cash would mean having lots of cash handling expenses (cash registers etc) but still likely almost no cash in circulation. It’s part of the reason the riksbank is eying a CDBC with privacy features.
And yes if you travel to Sweden and order a meal at a restaurant you’ll probably always get away with cash if that is all you have (that is - they’d sort it out but in certain places it might be a bit awkward). But if you asked first they might say they “prefer card”. But pre-paid situations (e.g ordering a coffee to go) will often show a no cash sign. The opposite is always true, you’ll never need cash. If you take a taxi it’s card only, nearly no transactions between individuals (used goods, babysitter, beggar(!)…) are cash either.
In total though, the death of cash isn’t that widespread 8-9 of 10 retailers still accepts cash. It’s mostly in smaller shops, cafes and similar services you don’t see it (and taxi have been cash free for more than a decade). (In Swedish) https://via.tt.se/pressmeddelande/9-av-10-svenska-handlare-t...
However, that a retailer accepts cash doesn’t mean it’s convenient to use. For example in a large grocery store a small number of checkouts might accept cash meaning you’ll be waiting in line to pay with cash - so few will.
Does Sweden accept Visa/MC or they have some weird local card in most places?
Just checking in case i ever play the tourist in Sweden. Had trouble in NL.
I've encountered this from the Bay Area to Bangkok. It's a thing. That bar, or that Starbucks or whatever is card only/electronic payment only.
That is utterly ridiculous in the case of a car. If that was any concern whatsoever, then the dealer would say "let me drive you to my bank" and accept/deposit it there, which is a very, very common practice when seller is concerned with authenticity of the notes.
It's not an option in low value transactions like restaurant bills but then the risk there is low.
I know there are some places that choose not to accept cash payments to avoid cash accounting risk. That's cool, their choice I walk away... without paying them if they didn't disclose no cash policy clearly up front.
When I place an ad to sell a used something for €50 I don’t expect to get cash for it and the seller probably isn’t expecting me to accept cash as payment either.
I haven’t used a banknote for probably 10 years now. I haven’t even seen most of the banknotes in circulation here. This isn’t all positive (for privacy and resilience in a crisis), and the fact that I wouldn’t doesn’t change the equally important fact that I want to be able to do it. And that ability is of course in peril here. But it doesn explain the situation quite well wrt to what the real impact of laws like this would be.
Most people use bank transfers for this kind of stuff. The seller gives you their bank account number and you put the money in it. I recently bought a new car from a dealer, and I paid my transferring money to the dealer’s bank account. The dealer took credit card for the initial $1000 deposit but not for the full amount - avoids all those merchant fees on the full amount.
Here in Australia, you can now attach your phone number to your bank account (called “PayID”), so the buyer can just go into their Internet banking app, and transfer the money to the seller’s phone number - assuming the seller has set that up. I’ve noticed a lot of people still don’t set it up, often because they just haven’t heard about it
I didn’t do it because I store a lot of cash in hand but rather because it was a PITA to move large amounts of money with the bank that I was using. The bank wouldn’t even authorise me to transact more than €10k a day via a bank transfer.
It took me a good few hours in the bank - on calls to many departments - just to get access to my money.
I’ve since moved to one of the newer challenger banks and it has been the best decision I’ve made.
Doesn't sound like how any car salesman, or any commission salesman I've ever met thinks.
Car ownership is registered with government anyway, so it's not as if anyone can get away with pretending to be poor and owning a bunch of fancy cars anyway.
In my personal experience cash is how used car sales are done between individuals. There is sales tax on used car sales where I'm from. When the sale is agreed the seller and the buyer go to the registry. Say I'm selling you my car for 20k. You don't own the car until I sign ownership to you. I don't get any money until you hand me the cash. So safe thing to do is seller requires buyer to hand cash over and count it in front of the goverment agent. Buyer would prefer seller lie and understate sale price, but seller has no incentive to do that unless buyer gives that cash upfront. Buyer risks seller just saying "nah" and walking away with that cash. So it either requires trust, in which case no scheme the government comes up with can stop us anyway, or one party takes a serious risk, which there is strong disincentive to do.
Car has book value government agent knows anyway. Also, goverment exempts tax when seller and buyer are related. Government: "lol, you have trust, our despicable cash grab will not work here anyway so let's not bother"
So who cares here? Most big ticket property (eg. Real estate) works like this.
Some things like jewlery can slide through, but without receipts is risky crossing borders, which puts a serious damper status/utility of it, and those industries already get higher scruitiny anyway. And anyway, is it worth giving up our liberty over some tax revenue related to stuff like this?
So why prevent cash payments? The only purpose it serves it to keep the everyman under total control and open him to even more theft of savings via negative interest rates or transaction fees by financial middlemen.
Criminalizing cash is totalatarian in my view.
Just do a bank transfer to the individual you're buying the car off. Unless you live in a country with incredibly poor payments infrastructure, the funds will be available instantly.
You can't prove that in realtime without a trustee, which is just how things have been done forever. With all due respect, this is how it is in "advanced economies". Where are you personally from where you think anything other than cash provides instant, irreversable, and indusputable settlement in this case?
I will keep withdrawing my income in cash and inconveniencing others with cash transactions for every single purchase, including those exceeding this limit, out of principle.
Digital ledgers have proven to be unreliable. Anyone arguing otherwise hasn't witnessed bank runs, withdrawal limits, transaction limits, hyperinflation and war wiping out lifetime savings and destroying people's lives.
If you choose to deal with cash exclusively for the sake of it, so be it. But for everyone else, it’s just a less efficient way to move money from account A to account B.
There is usually at least a short lag between $DISASTER and $ECONOMY_COLLAPSE during which many people are happy to take cash and provide food, shelter and transport. Often you will have a steep inflation curve and rising transaction costs/exchange rates, but at least you are in control of the money that you have in your pocket.
The same cannot be said about digital money. Even though in theory you have a larger pool of places where you could spend it, money that is in your account isn't guaranteed to be accessible. Banks' infrastructure may be down, whether due to $DISASTER itself or corporate/political decision. The banks may impose withdrawal limits or a complete restriction on withdrawals and transactions. Online transactions may fail at any point in the acquirer-issuer-processor chain. ATM:s are likely to be empty.
Online transactions may be reversed. Even when you manage to "lock in" exchange rate X just before a currency's collapse in value, the merchant can and will cancel your order, make up excuses, and refund you the nominal value at the old exchange rate.
Affluent people tend to diversify where they keep their money. They have a few different checking accounts, savings/money-market accounts, brokerage accounts, assets, petty cash, and probably some other things. If you do not have the level of wealth that gives you the flexibility to keep large sums of money in a relatively inaccessible place (e.g. a brokerage account that might take 1-3 days to liquidate and another day to do a bank transfer), you might opt to keep a few thousand in cash in case something happens with your bank, such as your account being frozen or just drained due to fraudulent activity. It’s always prudent to keep reserves in diversified locations.
This law prohibits paying me for a month in cash.
If you receive your €10k as payment for a shipment of cocaine, you probably don't want to report it, so then you'll enter the territories of fiscal crime.
I want to be able to pay for as much as possible without leaving any record with a third party if I don't want to.
I also want to be able to take all of my money out of the bank and keep it for myself, and give it to whoever I want, whenever I want, without having anyone's permission to do so, or reporting that I have done so to anyone.
Why is that illegitimate?
Because the vast majority of people that want to do those things, are wanting to get away with doing bad things and/or not paying their way correctly in society.
You may be a rare outlier but there has to be precautions.
If there are prolonged power outages or some sort of disaster, prices will increase for food. Don't forget with the amount of inflation we have also increases prices for food.
Some people like to buy canned food or other food that lasts in bulk to get lower prices.
Australia is introducing (or may have already passed?) a similar Act with an AU $10K limit on "unapproved" cash transactions.
Over the limit you'll need approval.
Of course the usual loophole for the weathy applies, 3x $3,000 face value gold bullion coins [1] is under the cash transaction limit, although at a kilo each and ~$88K per in valuae, that's almost $300K in value technically under any travel or transaction declaration "$10K face value" limits . . .
[1] https://www.perthmint.com/shop/bullion/bullion-coins/austral...
― Anatole France
http://goldtheft.com/
So it’s technically impossible to lose anything if you don’t have more than 100k€ in a checking account. Which, even if you were rich, would be a rather stupid move because you don’t earn any interest on this. If your patrimony is superior to 100k€, you probably own financial assets rather than money in your checking accounts. And since you own your financial assets and your bank is only doing the management for you, they can’t be seized because they aren’t owned by the bank.
So it’s blatantly false to say that you can be seized of anything above 100k€. You’ve got to manage your money really badly to be bitten by this.
If you use it to pay $88k then the transaction is obviously $88k although you've then paid in gold, not cash.
I feel that this is a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
If I understand correctly you're saying: there is a coin that I can buy for $100,000 (because of its weight in gold) yet it is stamped with $1, which is its face value.
As such it only counts as $1, and this thus is not reportable?
Germany - I believe - has no set limit, Greece has 500 Euro.
The anti-laundering (and anti-terrorism) usefulness of limiting the amount of cash per payment has some merit, but (IMHO) it won't affect at all the illegal transactions (to evade taxes and VAT), it is news of these days of an ex-member of the EU parliament arrested in Bruxelles (in connection with presumed bribes related to the Qatar football world championship) arrested and found in possession of around 600,000 Euro cash.
https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-police-raid-gulf-lob...
I thought it was the case in France, too, but as it turns out that's the limit only when one party is a company. There's no limit for transactions between individuals (with a few exceptions).
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999?...
all fiat currencies have number-go-down technology. look at a graph of purchasing power vs time for any fiat currency. It always trends towards zero.
start using a currency with number-go-up technology. look at a graph of bitcoin. instead of going down, the number goes up. you should adopt this type of currency.
I am aware this sounds stupid. I am also 100% convinced that it is true.
Pushing them to NEED to use a profit driven banking system. Forcing them to be tracked. To have data mined and sold. To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
Profit driven, but available literally for free for an account and transfers (depending on the bank).
> To have data mined and sold.
GDPR says no.
> To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
We're talking about the EU here, not the US. There are a ton of challenger new banks.
GDPR isn't infallible. The EU and its individual countries have plenty of controversies.
>ton of challenger new banks.
Ton is a gross overstatement. It's a few that are truly independent from anyone else. The remainder are puppet / daughter banks.
Their existence barely influences the status quo and it certainly doesn't prevent outrage whenever banks used by over half the country's population threaten to fall.
So not for free. It would be one thing if banks had to guarantee those transactions being free but many banks want % of transaction in fees
Ah, remembering the surprise of upset people when they did not raise a suspect in front of bank clerks telling you "It's contactless, limited risk, 25u per transaction" (and already then the child-basic retort is "Times by how many transactions?"), and then were reached by the bank information that "owing to progress the limit is now raised to 50u / 100u / 150u ..."
If you're talking about fees I thought those were capped a while ago and haven't increased.
(Certainly not me: I will not accept embedded fixed NFC - not in documents, not in bank cards, not in general.)
Yes. I will rephrase: people were told, "Here are the details of the system: if anything goes wrong, it can only be for 25u". Some people trusted that as a fixed contract. Then, some received the (expectable) communications that the formerly established limit will change. Depending on the country and system, some doubled, some were raised to 150u (if I remember well), with promises to arrive soon at 500u (if I remember well).
Other details are not different in nature: if the PSD2 imposed that the via-PIN "signature" has to be provided every 5 transactions, that does not mean that at a later stage this will not be modified to 500.
The point is: if it is intrinsic to the system that the configuration can be globally changed, expect it.
About the logic: you have to foresee them "slopes", when you see they /are/ "slippery". The fallacy is in assuming the future. It is on the opposite _duly_ to consider the chances.
Also is "u" standing for a specific currency, or what?
Source ?
"To have data mined and sold."
Which is completely illegal according to GDPR.
Russian mafia is living in billion dollar mansions all around EU in the open, with full knowledge of EU 3 letter services.
Why would anybody go for "retail" laundering when you can buy a bank for a pocket change in Cyprus?
Ways to launder money fully legally are vastly, vastly more widespread than mules with bags of cash, and are protected by connivance of Western governments.
Those people hide their assets in swiss banks, along with dictators and corrupt politicians.
This is for poor schnucks and the occasional scapegoat.
From the point of view of the state, tax evasion these days is by far the highest priority.
Tax evasion is not a top priority however you look at it... the argument sounds like "but think of the children" to justify things that are actually motivated by other aims and/or ideological reasons.
Everyone deserves health care, fire suppression, police to respond to criminal behavior, courts, a national defense and a defense of democracy against terrorists and would be fascists and others who would overthrow it.
Some things like health care can be provided albeit exceptionally poorly with a ridiculously bad ROI by a mixed private / public system. Others are ridiculous to imagine. For example if you privatize the military you create a single concentration of power that could trivially be bought out by anyone wanting to shitcan democracy tomorrow.
If it were possible to effectively run a large society like that one would suppose that in thousands of years one would have been so constituted.
Sentences like “the state lost €30bn of revenue because of tax evasion” rubs me the wrong way. It’s not too far off from saying “mugger lost €500 of revenue because the potential victim ran away”.
I do realise it’s a fallacy—it’s just not too far off.
Tax evasion is overwhelmingly the rich stealing from the poor.
And you seem be talking about the elimination of tax evasion as if it's actually possible. Clearly it is not. The amount of tax evasion can potentially be decreased through policy and effort and we just need to decide how much we accept. Maybe the current level _is_ acceptable? In any case, some level must be acceptable. What level is acceptable to you?*
*This is a trick question. It's basically unanswerable without knowing the cost of enforcement (which increasing asymptotically as the amount of evasion goes to zero). But it is a reality that everyone should probably come to terms with.
So no...
Yes, because people taking a bribe would definitely care that it’s illegal to have a cash transaction over €10k
I am sure there are some benefits to living into this system, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
Maybe you prefer to keep paper receipts for tens of years and prove they are legit, I honestly don't.
This implies, no record of personal purchases around.
The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
What's stopping peoole to do it?
I regularly pay my drinks cash.
I never paid a beer more than 10k though...
> The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
I'm glad that when I pay someone for something they can't say I didn't do it and ask for the money again.
That includes the State.
I paid my taxes, here's the proof.
I already paid my energy bill, here's the statement from the bank, have a good day.
Besides, what you are talking about has nothing to do with limits to cash transactions, I am honestly scared by the idea of going around with 10k in a bag to pay for something
only a fool or a criminal would actually do it and feel comfortable about it.
it's betting against bad luck and I an quite sure that I would not win.
Are you sure that you are going to the appointment with the seller with 12k in cash and they are not showing up with guns and rob you?
And what would you do then?
Go to the police? that first thing will do is ask you why you were going around with that much cash in a bag.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Bad question. Good question instead: "What seems to be the trend which may be at some point stop people from doing it".
> what you are talking about
You do not get the point. Of course one is glad to have the ability to prove transactions that one wants to be recorded; the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
very easy answer: progress.
same reason why people don't use shells as coins anymore.
> the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
As the philosopher Jägger once said
You can't always get what you want
It's a fundamental principle of any community that ever existed, apparently in some parts of the richest World people are incapable of understanding that me is much less important than everyone.
Imagine a World where I say "I don't want to have an ID with my picture on it" but I also want to travel around the World freely, because I don't like explaining myself to random strangers in uniforms.
There are easy solutions to what you are looking for, Theodore Kaczynski is a notorious and virtuose example on how to pull it off, but none of them involve large amounts of cash spent in a single transaction, which is fishy per se because it requires two or more parties agreeing to do something that has virtually no advantage, except the most common: hiding something. I would like to understand what that something is, because the most obvious conclusion is "something shady". We all agree on that, let's be real.
I understand if protesters in HK buy tickets for the subway in cash to not get tracked by the Chinese government. Chinese are famously a little bit repressive.
I don't understand why someone in the US, living in the best and freest country in the World, the greatest democracy ever, the place where dreams come true, a Country where, unlike China, they give protesters a price in the form of a few days in jail, would like to spend large amounts of cash instead of using more modern systems to hide from their government and the IRS, two of the things that define "the most civilized place on the Planet", according to its citizens.
Something's doesn't add up here.
If it wasn't about the US, that we all know is heaven on Earth, one might be inclined to think that it's the reaction of a cynical, narcissistic, money driven, trigger-easy population to a government that has only one way to make people behave like they live in a single united Country and belong in a modern society, not tribes: violence and tyranny.
But that's obviously false for the US.
You know, as European, the many flaws of Europe are an advantage.
Even if the government wanted to track me and all my expenses, they are so incompetent that I'll probably be dead before they realize that I bough a new electric bike with my CC. I live dangerously, I know.
Most of them introduced them to decrease tax evasion, not money laundering.
You can still have that much money in cash, just not pay with it one transaction.
Through a very obscure logic, since payment cap cannot exclude unregistered payments.
This starts making half-sense - it is not to curb the possibility that the merchant evades, but to hinder spending earning coming from evasion. Unfortunately, that money that may come from evasion is the same money that comes from normal earnings: so the damage is spread, not surgical. For example, now Men (is it just the two of us?) in Spain cannot purchase, say, a Macbook (the threshold there is reportedly at 999€).
It seems like one of those generalizing measures like "Populations labelled as irresponsible socially extroverts as an aggregate will have individuals bound to confinement in case of epidemic", which even when they work as an effect involve massive lateral damages.
If you want to evade taxes by skimming 5 cents on each coffee, you have to sell 200.000 unregistered coffees to save 1.000 euros.
Which is more than 3 times what an average Italian bar sells every year.
"Name one practical reason to pay amounts higher than 1.000€ in cash." – unknown progressive
it's 10.000 euros, you're off by an order of magnitude.
Can you name one practical reason to pay more than 10k cash?
So he is.
But then again, what's the practical reason to pay more than 1k cash?
If they can freeze your money in the bank, they can also freeze the cash you keep stashed in your room.
paranoia is stupid.
I am all in favour for protester not living tracks, it doesn't involve money transactions over 10k in cash though. I don't see how the two things relate.
Just that.
If the bank knows, the government does.
It makes sense: if I buy a motorbike from you using cash and nobody knows about it, when I am going to rob a bank with it, the police would come knocking at your door. Would you like that just to let me use cash instead of any other system available because we are normal people that live in societies not in a lawless imaginary city in a western movie (west was not lawless, properties where already registered 4 thousands years ago by Egyptians, it's nothing new)
Simpler yet, if the police stops you and there isn't your name on the certificate of ownership , you have to justify why is that.
Again, it makes complete sense. It could have been stolen and you could be the thief.
A washing machine costs 250 euros, you can pay it in cash.
The limit is 10k, it's 40 washing machines.
The washing machine comes with a warranty, warranty is valid only if you put your name on it.
Only a fool would renounce to 2 years warranty to pay cash and not let the government know that they do laundry, like literally everybody else, I'm quite sure the government doesn't care if you own a washing machine, but then again I live in Europe, probably the CIA does and it's a big deal there.
I really don't understand how people feel comfortable going around with thousands of euros in cash in their pockets to buy stuff that they could have comfortably and safely bought from their couch using a free and immediate bank transfer that guarantees both parties against fraud, and theft and that have no handling costs.
American paranoia about government will be the worst heritage of these last two decades.
But probably even worse is the idea that your freedom means I have to pay the price for it.
Wanna pay a house or a car in cash, without any record of the transaction?
Go buy it from a criminal, because I am not selling it to you. Nobody would. Unless they are being paid to accept all that cash in one transaction.
High end electronic equipment, for example.
Or do you by personal devices linking them to your name?
Do you really believe you are anonymous?
SIM cards are not, for example, since forever here in Europe.
warranty certificates must contain all your personal data to be valid.
You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Why?
what's the deal with that laptop, what's the reason to keep it secret?
Suddenly your secrecy it's much more interesting for the shop owner than you paying with a bank transfer or credit card like any other person would do and not raise any suspicion.
If I was them I would alert someone, in case you'd do something illegal with it, just to be on the safe side.
See? even if you are a criminal using cash just for the sake of using cash it's stupid.
Most shops don't even accept large amount of money in cash, it's dangerous for them and costs them a lot more to handle and keep safe.
even many bank offices or postal office don't keep cash to avoid being robbed. It's for employees safety.
It is hoped that nobody is so stupid to try that.
> Do you really believe you are anonymous?
I radically believe on that right of so being.
> You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Very certainly.
> Why?
Because that is what a Man does.
> what's the reason to keep it secret
Basicmost principle.
> interesting
Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting: they cannot understand. If they had been part of a Civilization, they would know that a Man does not concede on the side of privacy.
> even if you are a criminal
Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
Nothing new, it is part of the scheme: criminals have something to hide; Men have everything to hide; subjects have nothing to hide.
There are people that believe in a magical being with long blonde hair that died and resurrected 3 days later.
That doesn't make it real.
I know a few people that cannot be tracked by the usual means, you would never survive living their life.
> Basicmost principle.
I'm sure police will understand when they stop you with 15k euros in your backpack and no justification for it.
> Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting
No, they are not.
Privacy is closing the door when you go to the bathroom, what you are talking about is secrecy.
Which is why the CIA is called a secret service and not a privacy service.
To commit crimes unpunished, you need secrecy.
Interestingly, monkeys do understand that, some people don't.
> Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
It's exactly what they do. One of them bought Twitter. Another was best friend and producer of all the Hollywood celebrities. Another one won the presidential elections in the United States of A.
Reality beats fiction every time.
Mostly coz many banks take % cut on big money tranfers so taking it out and just giving it to someone in a bag is sometimes tens of thousands cheaper
In most of the EU, buying land and houses is done through a notary services. Depending on the country, you either do a SEPA transfer directly to the notary, and they then send it to the other party. Or, in other countries, you do the SEPA transfer to the other party, and then the notary approves the ownership-transfer once both parties confirm the money-transfer is complete.
Estate ownership is not proved by a piece of paper like with American "titles", they're backed with government-kept records, which only a notary can change. (and that's what you pay them for, in addition to taxes)
Nothing is happening in cash, because many EU governments want to be able to follow the money used to buy estate. Notaries usually report the transfer to the tax authorities. If the money cannot be justified, the notary must cancel the transaction, and some financial investigators will follow up.
There are no fees, as opposed to what many other HN commenters says. Because if your bank has fees for SEPA transfers, you can always switch to virtual-cross-EU-online banks which have no fees for SEPA transfers.
However, you will be notary fees, which most of it is just plain tax.
Yes, notary was involved and it would be invalid if buyer didn't paid, but it was very much a bundle of cash getting exchanged.
A notary signing an agreement between a buyer and a seller is a legitimate reason to spend all that money in cash.
Which is very rare though, I only know old cow farmers in little towns close to the mountains here that deal with much cash (for lack of near bank offices and their lack of a driving license)
So someone might officially pay 20.000€ for a piece of land, pay the taxes and fees based on that price, but pay the remaining 60.000€ in cash.
Obviously this is illegal, but the notaries are in on it.
Two examples from my European Country, where the practice is spread and people believe they are smart but are really not.
---
a lot of people did it here, especially in the 80s-90s. Then we started building high speed 4 lanes highways and high speed trains. You know how much the State paid for the land used to build those infrastructures?
EXACTLY!
The nominal values, so basically people got compensated for a tenth of the actual price.
The State also explained publicly that most of the land in straight flat paths, was chosen using their market value. If it's worthless, nobody will protest, on the contrary, they will be happy that someone is buying it for a price.
Some of these people were so stupid that sued the State. Of course the State won and also discovered the fraud, collecting even more money in the form of fines.
---
Recently a campaign of subsidies to improve energy efficiency of buildings was launched. The benefits are up to 110% of the total costs. Yep, 110%.
So my parents, who always did everything by the book, and got called foolish by their neighbors for years, got for free a 45k photovoltaic system and the renewal of the shed, while most of the requests were rejected because various irregularities were in place. Which again did the government a tool to investigate who committed a fraud in the past and fine them.
---
Personal advice: unless you're Bezos level rich, don't try to outmsart the government. Chances are your children will have to pay for your assholeness.
so you would buy a house in cash?
How much will the personal protection cost?
I don't think I would accept to sell my house to soneone who pretends to pay cash, I wouldn't want to deal with that much money and all the risks involved, including the fact that there's no guarantees that the money is actually not fake.
Besides, money transfer is so cheap that it hasn't been an issue since at least 30 years ago.
We are taking about Europe here.
If you knew someone who buys houses in cash, can you swear your first question would not be "where did that much money in cash comes from?"
Have you ever bought a used car? Or played relatively high limit at a casino?
It’s perfectly normal to take 6 figures cash to a casino if you’re playing high stakes poker, for example.
And there are plenty of other reasons.
A cashiers check costs what? 10, 20 euros?
And we’re talking about how it can impact real people here, not the 0.1% who gamble 10 years’ minimum wage at the casino in one evening
Virtually nobody in Europe uses checks (in my country they are explicitly banned as a tender). It’s either cash or a bank transfer, and for such purchases, most people really prefer cash.
> And we’re talking about how it can impact real people here, not the 0.1% who gamble 10 years’ minimum wage at the casino in one evening
Most professional poker players are staked. They aren’t gambling with their money. It’s a job. A high risk, high reward job, but still a job. And it was just an example, and a perfectly valid at that.
And for pro poker players, they can just wire the money to the casino
Honestly I don’t see any moment in my life in a developed economy where I or anyone around me has needed more than a few hundred in cash
Yes. Virtually nobody uses them in Europe.
for more than 10k?
if someone has 10k cash they will not buy a used car, they will buy a new car, pay it in the next 5 years 200 euros a month and then sell it to a used car reseller.
No sane minded person would sell their more than 10k worth car in cash to an unknown party who shows up with a bag full of 50 euros bills.
BTW this position comes from people who regularly see cash as a form of freedom from oppression and support the use of crypto, which is digital assets that cannot be bought in cash.
So the options are logically 2: it's people that are not right in their mind or it's people who love cash because they don't pay taxes.
10k in cash is an unreasonable amount of money for 99.999% of the population.
I am an investor in my country in bars and restaurants and we're so happy that younger generations virtually use zero cash.
It freed me and my employees from having to deal with cash, bank deposits, handling and transferring money safely, theft, counterfeit money and many many other issues that the stone age money brings.
It also made it much easier to handle payments, I can tell the bank to pay and they will, instantaneously, while before we obviously used the money from the cash register to pay, to spend the cash money and avoid going to the bank to deposit it and had to trust the delivery guy, who changed frequently, to actually not steal the money and disappear (it happened several times over the past 25 years).
It made possible for young people, especially girls, to go around safely with no money on them and still live a full life while also keeping much more control on their expenses.
So cash it is.
Used cars go for way more than 10k. I bought my current car for 35k used. If you go to used car dealer, the average price is nowhere near 10k.
For small amounts? maybe.
Assuming you like bringing money with you and your time is free and you like to pay two times: the first time when you pay in cash, the second time when you have to waste time to get the money from an ATM.
There are much better ways to solve these issues and I use cash only with people I already know, other than to pay drinks and cigarettes.
For large amounts?
Absolutely not.
Unless the transaction is between two people with something to hide, of course.
Ironically, this is why Europe wanted to put a limit on cash transactions [1]
They probably know their chickens
[1] https://newsrebeat.com/world-news/124305.html
> Used cars go for way more than 10k
So what?
There's absolutely no obligation to pay in one transaction.
Even with raising interest rates, it's still more convenient to lend the money from the bank and pay monthly, instead of giving away 10k that could be invested in something much more profitable than a used car.
You can easily repay the loan in 5 years with < 200 euro/month even at rates around 5-6%.
> I bought my current car for 35k used.
That's a very expensive car and this [2] is 35k euros cash.
Not exactly "the best way" to pay. Honestly someone who pays a car with 35k cash, can only look like this in my mind [3]
This how I actually do it [4], paying monthly rates, very cheap interests, thanks, but no thanks.
[2] https://storage.ecodibergamo.it/media/photologue/2018/4/5/ph...
[3] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-J_rU5T5QbA/maxresdefault.jpg
[4] https://sg.lendela.com/assets/img/blog-you-can-t-pay-credit-...
If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules).
The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression.
> If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
I am saying that millions of cash transactions of this size take place every year and that the majority of them are legitimate. Whether or not you can think of reasons why people would use cash in that amount is sort of irrelevant.
Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.
This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.
All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway.
> All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.
You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/only-0-15-total-crypto-174206...
The share of illicit activities for cash is around ~5%, 33x more than cryptos.
https://www.quora.com/My-son-is-using-Lunix-an-illegal-hacke...
I'm surprised by the amount of negativity around this news really.
I now understand why some people in the states walk around openly carrying firearms, exercising their rights.
Why would I, a buyer, have any reason to want to receive large sums of money phisically rather than digitally if it's not for tax evasion? Having lots of money on you is dangerous and a hassle.
There's literally no good reason for this "freedom" that isn't tax evasion, money laundering or paranoid "being controlled".
The EU Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of 375 million eligible voters
p.s. even the US president is a non-directly elected entity
The people who do write the laws are directly elected at all levels of government.
While judges in some places are directly elected, at the federal level they are not. Beyond that, enforcement of laws is at the prerogative of the executive. If the laws written by directly elected officials are ignored, that is making law as well in some sense. For instance, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but the laws are unenforced and states are legalizing it themselves (contravening federal law).
[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZS.html
Like most governments?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/b...
As in, if you tried to buy a house, you'd still need to go through money laundering checks. You'd always be limited to small value transactions if you never wanted to pass some sort of KYC/money laundering check at some point.
I.E.: You got paid in Moneros, etc...
With the current inflation €10.000 will be worth far less in the near future, and I'm certain the amount won't be updated yearly to account for that. This 10k "magic number" has stayed the same for a long time. This isn't about money laundering as much as about control over even relatively low value cash transactions.
> There are two types of retail CBDCs. They differ in how individual users access and use their currency: // Token-based retail CBDCs are accessible with private/public keys. This method of validation allows users to execute transactions anonymously // Account-based retail CBDCs require digital identification to access an account // The two types of CBDCs, wholesale and retail, are not mutually exclusive[ - i]t is possible to develop both and have them function in the same economy
Pretty important, because currently having anonymous electronic transaction is heavily difficult.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/central-bank-digital-cu...
(I understand in this tree the '/S' is taken for granted.)
I can't speak for all of EU, but here in Austria tax evasion is very common.
For example, it's still extremely common to pay contractors under the table. They will ask you if you need an invoice, and the price will be a lot lower if you don't.
Another example are restaurants. For a few years it has been required that restaurants always provide you with a receipt, but especially asian restaurants still don't do so.
All that untaxed revenue costs the state billions in missing taxes.
If you limit cash payments, then you make it at least slightly harder for someone to eg. buy a car with that untaxed money.
I really don't see any reason why you would need 10k€ cash payments if not for tax evasion.
To avoid banking fees?
"Oh lultimouomo", you say, "the were transfer might be nominally free but sure having a bank has other costs involved". No fixed cost, yrgulation, so by the very fact of having a bank account, depositing money in it and taking it back by wire transfer or ATM you are never paying a fee. Also, cash has a cost. You risk being mugged, you risk getting a wrong change by the cashier, the store risks a robbery / break in (and most often pays expensive insurance to protect itself against this)