They want privacy for regular people, accountability for the rich and powerful.
If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules).
The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression.
> If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
I am saying that millions of cash transactions of this size take place every year and that the majority of them are legitimate. Whether or not you can think of reasons why people would use cash in that amount is sort of irrelevant.
Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.
This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.
All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway.
> All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.
You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.