Belgium, France, and Spain all have had cash limits of €3k, €3k, and €1k respectively for some time now. And the US has a variety of reporting triggers set at $10k. None of those limits have been inflation adjusted. So indeed more and more people become subject to unwarranted surveillance as time moves further beyond 1984.

But then consider Germany. Germans are wise enough to understand what they give up when giving up cash, so while the EU law has little effect on Belgium, France, & Spain, Germans are getting fucked by the EU on this and AFAIK there is no inflation adjustment at the EU level either.

It’s a shit law but if we must have it I would like to see it indexed to postage costs, which has been going up by leaps and bounds. The cost of printing a page at the library has gone from 5¢ to 10¢ in the past year.. so that would be a good inflation index for this as well.

And that's while top EU officials are still not being elected, and are in fact personally mostly shitty people and most likely very corrupt and with solid background of being in bed with dictatorships and cleptocracies.

This is only hurting people who need to make some large down payment legitimately

Yes, this is intended

Thanks for the link.

It’s important to note that chat control keeps getting reincarnated. So it’s an on-going fight.

In Canada etransfers are usually limited to $3k/day. On big invoices I get paid over multiple days. It's not that big a deal for me. I think people look at it like they can only get robbed of 3 grand a day.

They are not assholes. They are in fact very smart and steadily moving towards their goal.

They are reducing applicability and efficiency of the means they themselves don’t need.

You just described people looking after the interests of number 1 at the expense of others. We call them “assholes”. That’s the appropriate term for what you describe.

(btw, this is orthogonal to intelligence… there are smart assholes and there are stupid assholes).

That 3.000€ sex toy 😋

This is stupid, money in that range is irrelevant on a national scale. The real laundering and robbing happens in the millions and billions and is committed by people in suits gifting each other yachts and real estate.

No it's not. The real money laundering is happening in the area of billions and we lose billions by companies not paying taxes. The normal people here don't matter at all. 3k is tiny, that's less than my gaming PC costs if I want to sell it used. Wtf

Criminals make most of their money from drugs. And most law enforcement resources are allocated to fighting drugs.

It's our failed "war on drugs" that is creating a rich criminal class in society.

Legalize and regulate drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling and then there won't be a huge criminal economy. What remains can then be easily squashed by law enforcement.

Money laundering has the opposite effect that you think it does. Money laundering takes untaxed money and puts it through a process that results in tax revenue. The /absence/ of money laundering “robs” us, if it’s tax revenue that you have in mind.

The lazy AML enforcement style is what robs us, and it robs us of privacy, dignity, and autonomy. If they would enforce AML the same way they enforce other crimes (getting proper search warrants that respects our human rights when suspicion warrants it), AML would be enforced without collateral damage to law-abiding people.

Enforcement of tax evasion would be a petty cause to use as an excuse to force every single person in the land to patronize commercial banks. Like subjecting everyone to facial recognition and tracking just to make the work of a few shoplifters harder. It’s disproportionate and undermines our freedom because law enforcement wants their job to be easy. We lose our autonomy and options so law enforcement can have a bit of occupational convenience. Which amounts to nothing because criminals will simply tweak their operation.

Our boycott rights have been lost

We have just lost the option to boycott banks in Europe. Banks that:

• finance fossil fuels
• invest in private prisons
• donate to the campaigns of right-wing politicians
• snoop on us
• force us to register for mobile phone service
  • force us to share our mobile number with them
• force us to supply an email address (then they use MS Outlook themselves so MS can see where we bank)
• force us to use their shitty dodgy closed-source smartphone apps
  • and force distribution through Google Playstore so Google can also see where we bank
• block Tor users from their website (thus violating data minimisation principles when collecting IP addresses), then at the same time charge an unreasonable fee to offline customers blocked from their website who request paper statements
• discriminate against people on the basis of national origin
• lock us out of our money for frivilous reasons like:
  • forgetting to give them an updated ID card copy the instant before it expires
  • block us from donating to Wikileaks.
  • set withdrawal limits in a protectionist tactic against runs on the bank
• subject us to negative interest rates
• deploy ATM machines that lie to us

We should have a right to decide whether to enter the private marketplace and patronise a business, especially a shitty industry like banking. We should have a right to boycott bad businesses. In the EU, that right has been lost. It’s a profoundly foolish trade to give up boycott rights so tax evaders have to work a little harder to dodge the auditors. Losing our right to boycott then has the consequence that banks can become even more enshitified because they need not earn our business. The banks can piss on us all they want if we are forced to lick their boots.

It’s a perversely stupid compromise of agency over our own lawful lives in order to make law enforcement a little more convenient and crime a little more inconvenient. To slightly give the cats a bit more advantage in the cat-mouse game at the cost of our liberties.

There are some parallels to the profoundly naive efforts to ban encryption or impose master keys. They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.