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Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

> They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful?

Well, for one, they control cash production

> It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting.

Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

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- paying a team of day labour workers

- hay / feed delivery

- combine/equipment rental

- equipment resale

- livestock

- farm vehicle sales / repair

It's probably fine, and I hear you can eat bugs.

I’m pretty sure the 3000 limit is not at all a huge issue in any of those cases pretty much anywhere in Europe and bank transfers are also cheap and instant.

Not that I agree with this ban. I really don’t but focusing on farmers specifically is very strange when farming is so heavily commercialized, especially in the Netherlands.

Bank transfers are cheap and instant when both parties in the transaction have a working bank account, which means they had a residence where they could receive mail, which means they had government identification, etc.

having an address and ID is not so much a problem, it is keeping your address and ID valid once a few dozen people in authority can live for years by charging money for lots of reasons to renew them, and perhaps also problems for you if you do not behave.

This is as old as countries themselves. You must be intellectually dishonest to ignore these historically crucial patterns.

You can get a functioning bank account usually in less than 30 minutes by downloading an app as long as you have a valid ID (no verified address is needed)

But yeah, if you’re not a citizen and don’t live in the EU it might be tricky (then again AFAIK bringing large amounts of cash from a third country is not that straightforward either).

What does this have to do with Dutch farmers, though?

EU is working towards requiring banks to provide homeless EU citizens with a bank account. Some countries have already implemented this. https://koronapay.com/transfers/europe/en/blog/how-to-open-a...

For paper mails some shelters allow for picking up post and in some countries you can get the mail as "Poste Restante" (i.e. pick up at post office).

Then people will surely use bank transfers voluntarily, eh? Why make them illegal?

Farming is under attack all throughout the EU, especially the Netherlands.

How?

Also, again, how is this specifically harming farmers more than anyone else?

Tell me you don't know much about how payments are done outside USA without saying so directly.

All of the above are very likely done electronically in Netherlands.

Denmark has an even lower limit (€2700) and there has been no problems with this. Denmark no longer supports payments using checks.

I've never heard of anybody being paid wages in cash in Denmark. It's so uncommon that the Danish IRS even had to explain it is actually possible to do so.

> - paying a team of day labour workers

It's illegal to pay minimum wage in cash, due to employers abusing and underpaying vulnerable people. (Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.)

Source: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-schijnconstr...

> - hay / feed delivery

> - combine/equipment rental

> - livestock

> - farm vehicle sales / repair

B2B transactions like that are done by billing. The other side wouldn't normally be very receptive to a cash payment.

> Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.

Interesting. In France, you can ask for your wages to be paid cash, but only if it's not more than €1500. Minimum wage as of May 1st 2023 is €1383.08.

If someone is paying for farm equipment, vehicles or livestock with tens of thousands in cash, you can absolutely be certain something very, very dodgy is going on. At the very least someone is doing some serious tax evasion.

So sounds like exactly the kind of transaction this law is supposed to block. working as intended.

You might be surprised by the volume of agricultural transactions settled in cash. Not sure about the Netherlands specifically.

Not from the Netherlands but from a small third world country: farmers around here like to buy things on spot doing handshake deals and carrying bags of cash. I've heard them buying a lot things from cattle to agricultural supplies and even vehicles.

Mind you, this is a poor country. The middle class in the capital city can't even dream of making what these farmers make.

I still see this in rural America. Guys show up and transfer the title on the car for an envelope of cash and a signature.

Same for livestock, butchering, services and so on.

I've done this myself many times. No one wants a check (especially not a probably-fake cashier's check) and no one wants to take the time to go to a bank, and why does the bank need to be involved or aware at all.

> and why does the bank need to be involved or aware at all

In the EU you can transfer the money instantly using your phone.

Not that I agree with the ban but a lot of the issues people are discussing here are only relevant in the US (checks? lol.. what is this the 60s?)

You can in the U.S. as well, with the security nightmare that is Zelle.

Doesn't even have to be rural America. I bought my car for $6000 cash off Craigslist, and I'm in the bay area

Done this for over 20 cars, not rural, or old. You sound like you have never bought a car without a loan.

>Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

While each transaction might be <3000, on a good weekend, I could see it totaling to be over that amount. At this point, would it be illegal for the farmer to show up to his bank to deposit 3001? Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000? Maybe take the spouse and kids along so they each make a smaller deposit? Does this require visiting multiple branches?

You can deposit whatever amount you want into your bank account, they just might ask questions regarding where the money came from, and if you show that you sold products there's zero issues.

> show that you sold products there's zero issues

well, there might be one small issue!

how can you 'show you sold products'? after all, you sold them!!

isn't the cash sufficient to show you sold products? hasn't it been sufficient for thousands of years?

Every single country in the EU has VAT. If you’re yearly revenue is to low (not that likely for commercial farmers) you still have to give out receipts for every sale.

Also have you heard about bookeping? It’s also a thing that has existed for thousands of years.

So a farmer is giving out receipts; how does that help the farmer at the bank?

To sum up, what is the standard of records that the bank will accept? Is there one?

does the bank say, "we see you wrote that you sold 20 boxes of produce on Saturday"

Presumably you have to pay taxes so the standard is probably somewhere in between what the tax authorities acquire and no questions asked.

Buy yeah, some banks in the EU might be overzealous and small/medium businesses can often run into issues related to their idiotic fraud prevention systems. But I don’t see how is that an issue with the system itself and not with the implementation.

This isn't the gotcha you think it is. As for all businesses transactions, you should file it in your accounting software and make sure you pay taxes, vat etc on it. This law changes nothing in that regard.

So now you're bringing in your accounting software and tax records to the bank to make the deposit?

A cash deposit into a bank isn't a payment.

That's a very strange question. Obviously businesses are still allowed to deposit more than 3000€ to their bank accounts.

How would supermarket function otherwise?

The farmer isn't an individual, it's a business as well.

Doesn’t this only apply to individual transactions?

Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

>Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

Is it? I find it weird you think so. If you and I exchange > 3000 between us, nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless. The one place that this can be policed is at the bank level. You're assumption seems to be that if you gave me 3000, I'd just keep it in cash.

In the US, if you make a deposit > $10,000, the bank is regulated to report it. It doesn't matter why you are making that deposit, it gets reported. Applying the same thing to Euro markets only seems natural.

Edit: Actually, even car dealerships have to report someone showing up to buy a car with >$10,000 in cash as well.

> Is it? I find it weird you think so.

We might focus on the law itself and not some hypothetical situation.

> nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless.

You can’t sign a contract for anything worth more than €3000 if you want to pay in cash. If you want to declare your income, pay taxes, prove that you obtained the money legally when you later want to deposit it to an bank, during a tax audit etc. Of course it won’t affect transactions which are already done illegally so it depends on what do you mean by ‘pointless’.

The $10k limit is also a thing in Europe, the exact amount varies by state though (I think).

> Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000?

In the US, that's called structuring and will result in some very uncomfortable conversations.

Do you not see difference between paying for service and depositing account ?

Right, but they don't control the distribution and transaction of cash. They may stop producing €500 notes—for example, but there is nothing they can do to stop these farmers or undocumented immigrants from bundling together >€3000 in smaller notes for use in paying rent, buying cars, or investments.

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> if they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate it all and punish the people who had that kind of cash; it's becoming 'the law'

Can you please not make shit up to be obsessed about?

No need to curse to make your point, especially since this is a burgeoning area of both criminal and civil law in western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Unio...

So you need to be convicted by a court and the government needs to be able prove the money was obtained from illegal sources?

How is that unreasonable and more importantly what does it have to do with the €3000 limit discussed in this thread?

It can simply be seized.

Whether a conviction occurs in court is largely irrelevant, because it's in excess of the 3000 limit that this law actually puts in place, and therefore de jure illegal.

In the U.S., no conviction of the owner is even necessary, since the conviction is of the cash itself. This is likely coming to EU as well because it's a easy way for the enforcement state to increase its coffers and, in theory, stop money laundering.

> because it's in excess of the 3000 limit that this law actually puts in place, and therefore de jure illegal.

I don't get it, do you not understand the difference between possessing a certain amount of cash and making a single payment over a certain amount in cash?

How do you make a logical leap from the latter to the former?

Similar laws in the US have readily morphed into we're going to hold it until you prove it's not from illegal sources. Googling it will provide many examples.

I don’t care about examples from the US. How is that relevant or at all related to this specific ban?

> So you need to be convicted by a court and the government needs to be able prove the money was obtained from illegal sources?

The way you read laws isn't how the enforcers need to read it. That isn't a US specific issue.

Follow up, the EU is pretty much on the same page as US authorities. No convictions needed.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1acd50be-5237...

No need to add irrelevant links to make no point, there's nothing in the draft that prevents you from possessing >€3k.

> they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate

Any sources which would substantiate this claim?

Fyi production of 500 euro bill was halted over three years ago.

> Well, for one, they control cash production

They have the euro as do most countries in the EU so they don't control cash production.

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