ciferecaNinjo @ ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io

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2 yr. ago

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There has been a movement to remove cash for a long time.

Yes, Bill Gates and his “Better than Cash Alliance” are working diligently to impose forced-banking on everyone, to get everyone licking the boots of giant corporations, as he was quite successful in doing with Microsoft.

Europe will not eliminate cash because the EU has exclusive competency over the single euro and legal tender status and meaning. If you read any court docs like that of the Hessischer Rundfunk, it’s very clear that there is a hard line prohibition on any attempts to abolish euro cash banknotes.

The problem is that while the continued existence of cash is guaranteed, forced-banking is still happening in parallel. You might have a right to buy a burger using cash banknotes but you’re not free from banks if a tax payment via bank transfer is imposed. That’s the problem. We have the worse of both worlds.

Banks still have an incentive to earn your custom as there are (still) different banks so you get to choose,

It’s not good enough. It’s easy for 6 or so banks to “compete” against each other as they collectively screw people over in various ways. Cash from the central bank is a competitor that will /never/ force you to run a smartphone app, for example, or charge you a fee. Cash is the single most important competitor banks can have.

Thanks. I wonder how long that statement has been made. In the past I was never confident in the wording from the national bank as far as expiry of banknotes. But the page you link seems solid enough. Saving an archived version here as an extra measure against any future shenanigans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250521052910/https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes

(and because bankofengland.co.uk is not an open access website)

That does not seem to be the reality down on the ground. A guy was complaining about his 50 EUR cash deposit being refused because he could not prove the source.

Maybe you are thinking what the law mandates, in a situation where banks are free to be more extreme than the law? A lot of banks generally try to be “overachievers” when it comes to legal compliance because consumers are pushovers and regulators only care about the legal infringements that concern the state and not consumers. Some banks refuse cash deposits entirely and outright. So if that’s legal, why would it not be legal to demand proof of source on a deposit of €50?

BTW, if you find a bank that minimally complies with the law and gives the full legally permissible amount of privacy to customers (and respects GDPR data minimisation laws), please let us know! I don’t think such a thing exists.

I don't know the Belgian case, but I think it's the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out! Should be corrected now.

Well that rationale doesn’t withstand the fact that people can change their gender identity without updating their ID docs. Recipe for disaster.

Well, it wouldn’t require lying but certainly it seems tricky. You can deregister before you leave the country and neglect to provide an address for where you are going -- because you wouldn’t necessarily know in advance and you cannot provide information that does not exist. So they clear your address from your id card which then just has an empty address.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a specific legal obligation to state where you live abroad.

Though one snag is that you have a legal obligation to vote in elections and you must vote in the nearest embassy, which requires giving an address to get on the voting roster. However, voting is not strictly enforced. If you fail to vote there is a small fine but I don’t think they actually hit unregistered people abroad with that. If you do not vote in 3 consecutive elections, then you could lose your voting rights for a few years, I think.

I do not believe the bank gets a notification that you have deregistered. But at some point your ID card on the bank’s files will expire and they will expect an updated copy and freeze your account until they receive it.

If you walk into an embassy to “renew” your passport, do they demand an address? I would think you would pick up your passport at the embassy a week later. Or do they mail it?

Anyway, I can understand giving in to surveillance and disclosing US ties, but OTOH it seems like a nightmare to do what’s expected as well.. to be tagged as a toxic US person. It’s a mess either way. Perhaps the wisest move is to “move” to Canada, stay there a couple months, setup residency, then move to the US and just neglect to mention it. Get mail forwarding from Canada.

Half their internet banking site is off-limits to me

Mind elaborating? Did they restrict your account specifically, or does the website simply treat logins from the US differently? I’m surprised you wouldn’t retain full cloud access so long as your account exists under the terms you signed up for.

I don’t understand why you would tell your Belgian bank that you left Belgium, particularly when your new residence is the US which flags you as a toxic asset that requires special handling. That could only work against you. Surely you would be better off not telling them you moved and use a VPN to Belgium to access your acct.

Bingo. This is true even across EU borders. Rabobank in Netherlands does not exchange info with Rabobank in Belgium, IIUC. (but note I think Rabobank quit doing business in Belgium eventually anyway)

I appreciate the insight. My other speculation was that it was an anti-spam tactic.

In Belgium residents can post a sign/sticker saying /no pub/ and by law it must be complied with, but there is no enforcement and not much compliance. Unlike Switzerland, who charges people to opt-out of ads but then diligently fines violators.

Considering your apparent adversity to surveillance advertising US tech giants, it’s a bit of a surprise that you would consider using ItsMe, a service that forces you to trust Cloudflare and be subject to Cloudflare’s bullying, oversight and access restrictions. There is no way to use ItsMe without letting Cloudflare see your sensitive data.

That said, I do not know the answer to your question because I would never even try to use ItsMe in the very least because of it’s hostility toward tor users.

Glad to hear you can help drive that from the EU side. Until then, I will continue sending paper correspondence. It would help if more people would insist on paper correspondence to create a bit of motivation.

I don't know of any such law or even which organization would be able to make such a law.

Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 covers ATMs to some extent. I think there was a law even broader than EU law but I’ve lost track of it -- or just have a bad memory.

Fee structure is indeed extremely intransparent in most cases. Generally, I have too look up ATM fees in my online banking access and I never know them beforehand. Iiuc, your bank and the ATM-operating bank roll the dice to find out the fees they each want to charge as part of the process of handing out your cash anyway.

The fee structure is indeed very well concealed. Before approaching an ATM the fees are undisclosed and many ATMs demand your PIN as the very 1st step. It’s a shit show for sure. But at least they must inform you of fees before you commit to the transaction, per 2021/1230.

In any case, no store wants to receive notes above €100 because politicians and media have successfully created mental associations between those notes and money laundry/corruption/organized crime.

Yeah I heard Germany has no cash acceptance obligation whatsoever, which by extension supports your narrative that they can be fussy about banknotes, as in France.

This contrasts with Belgium where brick and mortar merchants must accept banknotes. They can reject money that is disportionately sized if they want. E.g. they can reject a €200 note on a transaction of €20 but not on a transaction of €175. Or they can reject a shit ton of coins on a 3+ figure transaction.

I would say mostly true. And that much is driven by Regulation (EU) 2021/1230. If an ATM offers DCC¹, it must show the exchange rate and fees, and it must give a comparison to a non-DCC option, which must be offered (iow, there must be an opt out).

A common practice is to charge a flat transaction fee when DCC is not used, and to charge no fee when DCC is used, because the exchange rate is so terrible they are profitting hand over fist if you use DCC. But the ATMs often do not expressly state that the fee is waived in the DCC case -- they simply make no mention of the fee you would /otherwise/ pay had you not taken DCC. This is because (IMO) the ATM operator does not want users to relise that the exchange rate builds the fee into their fat margin.

I avoid DCC. But then my bank statement only shows how much was taken from my account in the account’s currency, not the ATM’s currency. The ATM receipt (which apparently does not exist in Germany) gives the local currency you pulled out. These two figures leaves you having trust them as far as the fees go. Some ATMs bundle the fee with the withdrawal amount and the drafting bank has no way of knowing what portion was for the fee. And of course neither do you, unless the machine properly informed you. But what if it didn’t? There is not enough information for the end customer to work out what the overhead was in some cases because the exchange rate applied by the account’s custodian is undisclosed.

¹ DCC: dynamic currency conversion

Do you think it's politicians' job to provide technology education?

Of course. Public education comes from the public sector. We should be electing politicians with administrations who are smarter than the general public. Any tech education that comes of Twitter abandonment is welcome.