[lxgr]

I'm a big fan of anonymous payments as a component of a resilient democracy, but to me, there's an amount cap where the tradeoff starts getting skewed from that to facilitating money laundering, tax evasion and other bad things.

I can imagine dozens of good use cases for <€5000 anonymous payments, but not many above that.

If there's real demand for it, I think we should come up with a technical solution that e.g. provides one-sided privacy like GNU Taler (taxation usually happens at the payee level, so the payer can usually remain anonymous; the same applies to things like terror financing etc).

[miohtama]

It’s important to remember that money-laundering is a secondary crime. There is always an underlying crime, and money laundering is just its effect. Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened). With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.

AML is a very convinient tool for anyone who wants to abuse power.

India: India throws another opposition leader in jail as elections loom https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/03/22/india-throws-anoth... from The Economist

Hungary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53093117

Plus Russia

Plus various African countries

Etc.

[acdha]

> Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened).

It prevents crimes as long as the people who would be committing them know it’s hard to cash out. As a simple example, phone theft was much worse in the United States a decade or so back because a teenager could grab a phone, wipe it, and get hundreds of USD. It plummeted once the stolen IMEI database went into effect because nobody buys a phone which can’t get service. It didn’t have to go to zero to be worth doing – just getting the easy money guys out often makes a big difference.

[miohtama]

The question is: if the new regulations will make it harder to cash out, or is it very hard to cash out already. If it is the latter, the new regulations do not contribute to the solving new crimes. In this case, the new regulations are not needed and the lobbying behind them is not about preventing crime, but about the interest of industry stakeholders. Such stakeholders include software companies that sell anti-money laundering solutions.

[lxgr]

> Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened).

Sure, but "follow the money" can be an incredibly powerful tool for criminal investigations.

> With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.

That's a concern I definitely share. I think there needs to be a push for a privacy-preserving middle ground between the complete two-sided anonymity of cash and some cryptocurrencies on one side, and the data privacy nightmare that's traditional electronic payment methods.

[b112]

The thing is, limits like this are never, ever raised.

40 years ago Canada got rid of the $1000 and $500 note. In all that time, the idea of bringing the $500 back has never been floated.

Yet soon, $100 will be worth $20 back then. I already find myself using $100s all the time, I used to fill my car for $25 in the 80s, now it's $80. Groceries are the same, I used to buy $30 per week, now it's over $100.

As time progresses, you'll have to carry a briefcase to buy gas or groceries.

So 5000 may seem like a good limit, but in 20 years you may not be able to buy groceries, or get gas, or buy a computer with cash or record keeping.

I always pay cash for my hardware. I don't need the store to link my serial number to my credit card number. I'm already using MAC addresses off of old ISA NIC cards.

[arp242]

I carried wads of cash when I lived in Indonesia, because card acceptance is so unreliable it's easier to just pay by cash. Bills of 100,000 (~€6.50) are the largest, and while prices are lower than in Europe or Canada, they're not necessarily that much lower for a lot of things. It's a bit awkward, but doable I guess shrug.

I paid 6 million in cash for my scooter, and you can imagine what that looked like. Upshot is I felt very rich and like one of those fellas in those rap videos throwing around money.

[b112]

Hah! I know this feeling, but only because I'm a bit of an asshat.

I friend lent me $2000 back in the day, so I went to the bank, and got 400 $5 bills. It actually felt empowering, and my friend even had a great time of it.

Yet it wasn't $6M, which just feels like a big number... no matter what the currency.

[hakfoo]

The US began withdrawing their $500/1000/5000/10000 notes in the 1960s as well; the last issues were nominally before WWII.

There was some discussion around the turn of the century that the introduction of the 200/500 Euro notes might impact the USD's status as the dominant "notes in a coffee can buried in the yard" store of wealth for the developing world, but it never went anywhere.

It is interesting that this seems to be a remarkable amount of faith in inflation being a managed slow-walk-- if you had Weimar-style inflation, any fixed limit would be blown through in weeks. Although, perhaps that's a secondary objective there-- if an economy with high paper-trail requirements starts to overheat, pinching the monitoring system might provide additional leverage.

[surgical_fire]

I am generally in favor of limits for anonymous payments, but you raise an excellent point.

What logically follows is that the it should be codified that the limit should be raised periodically (yearly?) based on the inflation rate.

[lxgr]

That's one problem, but the other is that big parts of our lives are moving online/digital, even in the physical world.

Getting gas at night in rural parts of the US without a credit or debit card is already practically impossible – there's nobody there to take your cash. Card-only restaurants, vending machines, shops etc. are already a reality in some countries as well.

I think we urgently need a semi-anonymous, cash-like alternative for low-value online and offline payments, because I feel like once we've lost the anonymity of cash completely, there's no way it'll be reintroduced in a digital equivalent.

The discussion around this seems largely poisoned though, with a lot of vocal crypto/libertarian takes on one side (often tangling the payment privacy aspect with monetary policy), and "nothing to hide, log everything, credit cards and ACH are perfection" on the other.