[ur-whale]

This makes me incredibly happy: there is finally a western European democracy that makes the outlawing of cash a true political issue.

The EU has quietly taken away what I consider to be a fundamental human rights over the past 10 years (the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was), and no one noticed.

Did you know you can't buy a car cash in most EU countries?

[EDIT]: This is issue is nowhere on the political radar of most USians because it hasn't come to your shores. But it should, because it's coming.

[concerned_user]

You can buy a car with cash but you will need extra documents to prove the cash is obtained legally, otherwise you can. Happens all the time actually in my country at least, so I am unsure where is your information coming from. It is less convenient than the bank transfer and takes extra paperwork but possible. Also of course you can go to used car market or buy from ads from a private individual, most of them will refuse cash tho. Nothing of it is anonymous of course.

[stallmanite]

Curious as to why a private seller would not accept cash. What's the disadvantage?

[tom_mellior]

> The EU has quietly taken away ... the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was

How was this the EU and not the convenience of card payments? Is there an EU regulation making us use less cash?

[ur-whale]

I didn't mean to imply the EU as a body enforces this, but the limits are real:

https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu...

[tom_mellior]

Interesting, thanks! For Austria this refers to § 61 Nationalbankgesetz (law on the National Bank): https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes... (in German, unsurprisingly).

That reads (my rough translation): (1) [The ECB and other central banks emit Euro bank notes.] (2) The bank notes referred to in (1) must be accepted at their full face value without limits, unless the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment.

IANAL, but to me this means like (a) there is already a law in Austria obliging businesses to always accept cash, except that (b) this might be meaningless since a business could always stipulate that "the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment".

[dfawcus]

Or maybe these two links would be of more interest, actually being the EU legislation in question (the later modifies the former):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

As I understand it, the former is implementing some international agreement where EU member states chose to use the EU as the mechanism to implement the agreement. The later seems to be the EU gold plating that (e.g. limiting anonymous electronic payments to €50).