They are already kinda banned.

Once payments are above a certain amount contact information must be collected as far as I know.

No bank transactions are anonymous.

Smaller money payments are anonymous, but mainly due to physical limitations creating enough hassle so that it can't be abused too much (without also braking the law). As well as historic reasons.

But did you ever consider that every bank note has a unique id which is tracked by banks when you pay in money (and I think) retrieve it?

Furthermore the EU as since basically it's creation slowly working on de-anonymizing payments wit the purpose of fighting crime and money laundering.

It's pretty much a straight forward continuation of pre-bitcoin invention policies.

That would require first eliminating bills and coins, a task I fear isn't very far down the road.

Nor are bills and coins nearly as anonymous as most people believe.

There's a reason every Euro note and US dollar comes stamped with a serial number...

Other forms of electronic payments already aren't anonymous.

Because if you are a politician who bans the crypto you won’t be ever elected again. Thus, you do it sneaky way.

The disconnect with reality is quite astounding. Do you actually believe that the majority interest right now lies with crypto? 'Normal' people have heard about it but have never in their life used crypto for a payment.

Cryptocurrency regulation is being discussed in the US, in the EU, in Russia.

50% millenials hold crypto in the US https://cointelegraph.com/news/low-millennial-financial-well...

Top cryptocurrency users are in Vietnam, Pakistan, Ukraine and India https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

While cryptocurrencies may not matter for you, or people around you that you identify as normal, based on the facts the topic matters a lot for lawmakers, politicians and large audiences you may not know.

50% of millenials is not 50% of the voting public. And yes, regulation is being discussed, that's what this article is all about. For pretty good reasons, the whole idea that there would be a forever unregulated way to transfer vast sums of money instantly is a pipe dream at best.

The article is about setting the reporting threshold to zero, not to some meaningful number that would prevent crime. What would be a comfortable purchase amount for you that you would like to have someone else to read your receipts?

For the perspective, the FAFT recommendation is $1000.

That reporting threshold is a direct consequence of tricks like mixers and other anonymizers. It is a neat tech trick but it is also just another form of smurfing / structuring.

Do you think there could better ways to automate smurfing detection that setting the reporting threshold to zero?

As far as I know, digital payments were never anonymous, so there was nothing to ban in the first place.

Bad title. It’s requiring de-anonymisation for crypto transactions. Not banning crypto.

We've changed the title to one that uses representative language from the first paragraph.

Submitted title was "EU wants to completely ban anonymous payments with cryptocurrency assets".