On 19th March the European Parliament, with a majority of main committees in favour, approved new anti-money laundering laws restricting anonymous payments. This includes both those with euros (EUR) in cash and those digitally with bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrencies.
Precisely, it determines that anonymous cash payments of more than 3,000 euros in commercial transactions and 10,000 euros in business transactions will be illegal. In addition, it will prohibit payments in crypto assets, regardless of their amount, made with anonymous wallets.
“This means war on cash and gradual erosion of our financial freedom!” said MP Patrick Breyer. He was one of two European Parliament commissioners who voted against the laws.
“Banning anonymous payments would, at best, have minimal effects on crime, but would deprive innocent citizens of their financial freedom,” he said in a disclaimer on his website. “We have the right to pay and donate online without our personal transactions being recorded (…). The medicines or sex toys I buy are nobody’s business,” she added.
The parliamentarian opposed to the laws argued that “this type of deprivation of financial rights must end.” “This European Union (EU) war on money will have unpleasant repercussions!” he warned.
Payments between anonymous bitcoin wallets are impossible to regulate
Breyer recalled that, for thousands of years, societies around the world have lived with cash to protect financial privacy. In fact, the attempt to protect identity in holdings and capital movements gave rise fifteen years ago to bitcoin, the first digital currency that can be self-custody in a wallet that is impossible to confiscate.
“If the EU thinks it can regulate virtual currencies at the regional level, it hasn’t understood the global nature of the internet,” Breyer said. To clarify, he detailed that the new rules “would be easy to circumvent,” since bitcoin and cryptocurrencies can be sent between two anonymous self-custody wallets.
“Virtual assets can be transferred directly from one person to another without using intermediaries, making them impossible to regulate,” he explained. For this reason, he suggested that the laws do not make sense.
In addition, he indicated that, in cases where virtual assets have been detected in criminal activities in the past, prosecution has been possible without these rules. This has been achieved, he said, through the investigation of on-chain movements that made it possible to find the identities.
At the moment, the date on which the laws will come into force has not yet been defined, although this could be within three years.
Image by ChatGPT/Dall-E
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