cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11683421
The EU has quietly imposed cash limits EU-wide:
- €3k limit on anonymous payments
- €10k limit regardless (link which also lists state-by-state limits).
From the jailed¹ article:
An EU-wide maximum limit of €10 000 is set for cash payments, which will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money.
It will also strip dignity and autonomy from non-criminal adults, you nannying assholes!
In addition, according to the provisional agreement, obliged entities will need to identify and verify the identity of a person who carries out an occasional transaction in cash between €3 000 and €10 000.
The hunt for “money launderers” and “terrorists” is not likely meaningfully facilitated by depriving the privacy of people involved in small €3k transactions. It’s a bogus excuse for empowering a police surveillance state. It’s a shame how quietly this apparently happened. No news or chatter about it.
¹ the EU’s own website is an exclusive privacy-abusing Cloudflare site inaccessible several demographics of people. Sad that we need to rely on the website of a US library to get equitable access to official EU communication.
update
The Pirate party’s reaction is spot on. They also point out that cryptocurrency is affected. Which in the end amounts to forced banking.
#warOnCash
Bitcoin doesn’t scale well, and also requires network connectivity.
I wonder whether we’ll ever be able to create a decentralized money system which would work over floppinets (figurative, USB sticks would do too, the point is not having good internet connectivity or any at all) and not be built on competitive wasting of computational resources.
You can’t solve double spend problem off-line, it’s just not possible - at best you can use secure element chips to prevent copying and tampering, but this isn’t a reliable solution.
In practice, at least merchant has to be on-line - otherwise your payment is only as good as your word
Yes, this part is similar to paper checks. I agree.
There may be a solution to spamming double spends - similar to existing f2f systems.
Lightning scales very well. Your information is outdated. A single bitcoin transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have trillions of transactions in a lightning channel between you and anybody else with a lightning wallet. All settle instantly for pennies in fees. They literally happen in under a second. In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. Lightning is decentralized and trustless, just like Bitcoin.
No matter how you slice it: market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, value of transactions, etc. Bitcoin is on a 15-year trend of growth on average.
Lightning relies on bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t scale well architecturally.
I’ll slice it in energy waste and most of the network being controlled by big pools.
This is a discussion which has happened many times with the same end result. This architecture is not satisfactory.
And you have not answered to this:
It may have eluded you, but cash doesn’t.
And this:
Is what we need if we want a system that may ever be in competition to interest of nation-states.
Except when you need to get new liquidity.
I tried opening incoming liquidity channel with phoenix wallet and it asked me to pay equivalent of 80USD for 1000USD of incoming liquidity.
This is unreliable because during congestion users can’t open new channels. Theres simply not enough base layer capacity to address high traffic scenario.