EU limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

The point for me is that the government automatically seems to think that cash payments are for something illegal. And all of a sudden, the burden is on me to proof that it is not.

While technically speaking, paying with cash is a very legal way to pay and should not require any explanation at all. Nor should it be more difficult.

Of course, there is a limit, and I get that paying a 2 million dollar house in cash is reason to at least ask where that money came from. But 3000 dollars or 100000 are amounts of money that in my opinion do not deserve the same amount of checking.

A lot of random but legal stuff can be done with 10000 dollars of cash. And yes, sometimes you use cash because you don't want your identity known. Doesn't mean you are doing something illegal. If the government thinks it is illegal, they should open an investigation and proof it.

Instead they put the burden on you. Doesn't seem fair to me, and a limitation on my personal freedom to spend money however I like.

Not to mention, even things that are legal now, could be made illegal by governments to come, and dictators or oppressive regimes will have no problems with checking logs to see which assholes did something that goes against their values in the past. For that reason alone, governments should only be tracking the minimum amount of information they need.

The war on cash is a war on privacy.

EU. It's the EU, not Europe.

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

The European Union is not synonymous to Europe.

Never underestimate the power of multiple legal anonymous cash payment spread out over time.

Actually cash payment in Europe is not a new problem. The problem is to obtain the cash in the first place. Try to walk into your bank and ask, say 20k€ in cash: you will be subjected to what amounts to a strict interrogation in which you'll be asked why you need it, who will receive it, etc. Nevermind withdrawing it from an ATM of course...

That and the Gestapo-esque KYC rules banks have to implement, and forced banking has effectively been a thing in Europe for a couple decades now.

Me, I withdraw the weekly limit from my ATM, week in and week out. Been doing it for years. When I need to pay for something I don't want banks or the state to know about, I have a big buffer of cash in my safe to draw from.

This is what you have to do in free countries now. It don't feel too free when you actually try to exercise you freedom to do whatever you please with your own fucking money...

How will they enforce it? I'm sure big/medium businesses will comply, but how can you track a cash transaction between private citizens?

Furthermore in the country where I live (Italy, one of EU founding members) more than 60% of independent professionals (partite iva) evade/elude taxes in some way or another, and it's very common (so common that every Italian experienced it many times in their lives, me included) for small businesses and professionals to offer you a slight discount if you pay cash under the table (no receipt, so no taxes) and, even if we have an entire police force dedicated to financial crimes, the submerged economy is just so big that they can't deal with it now, imagine when they'll have to arrest/fine everybody that accepts more than €3000 in cash.

What somebody writes on a piece of paper and what happens in the real world are 2 very distinct things, many stores in Italy don't accept credit cards even if it's against them law, and only a minuscule fraction of them gets fined.

The EU has extremely nazi-esque control on the private financial life of its citizens (the state monitors your bank account, to open a bank account you need to give every info about u in the future they'll ask for your DNA probably, if you withdraw/deposit a "suspect" amount of money our IRS will come after your ass, ane you need to prove your innocence basically guilty untill proven otherwise, ecc, there are a thousand examples, I'm sure EU citizens can relate) but I can't see how they'll be able to track pieces of paper.

TLDR I can't even see how they will be able to enforce this law, especially when we talk about small businesses/independent contractors, and the situation gets even funnier when its a transaction between 2 private individuals.

Use Monero, use Monero, use Monero.

Interestingly enough the €3k is, when converted to USD, almost exactly what I paid for, in cash, to buy my Street Triple a few weeks ago. I was weary of giving a ton of cash to some random stranger, and wanted to do a cashier's check. He didn't know what that was.

This makes me wonder, are cashier's checks considered cash under this rule in the EU?

Ok limiting anonymous cash payments is bad for privacy but wtf is limiting cash payments altogether???

Money laundering is a real issue so I understand why they would like to do something like this. Having read through the comments here I can see that a lot of people are opposed but I don't really get why.

Welcome to the communist Europe! This is what the friendly left got us.

I'm a huge privacy advocate, but on this issue I'm with the regulators. 3k EUR is plenty. More than the harmonized monthly average salary of the EU, in fact, which sits at below 2,200 EUR (source).

So people who value their privacy that much can easily receive their salary in cash and take care about their daily expenses without compromising anything.

For the odd purchase beyond that, the integrity of our society prevails. Money laundering and tax evasion are a major concerns everywhere in the world. Your advocacy pro-privacy actively harms honest taxpayers and governing bodies.