Thanks for the insight!

Have you encountered any merchants charging a fee for cash back?

I’m astonished to hear of that degree of nannying. But then it occurs to me that’s probably not an ATM limit; it’s probably a limit of the bank that issued your card. I would check your bank’s contract.

Since ATM fees don’t apply in your case, the fix is perhaps to open a few accounts so you can use one card after another. I guess assuming these are gratis accounts (not sure if that’s a thing in NL).

Another trick: buy something at SPAR and ask for €150 in cash back. I’ve heard SPAR has a 150 limit but not tested it. I would like to hear if any shops have a higher cash back limit than 150 as well.

Perhaps that was the case a year ago when you posted this, but now the free accounts allow zero outbound msgs.

It’s interesting that their highest tier plan is capped at 150 msg/day. In any case, I think @jet@hackertalks.com has no cause for concern.

My problem is that they delete trial accounts without reason & without warning. So I distributed my email address to people and just a few months later the address is dead. They don’t say the free accounts have a time limit. I thought the only limit was lack of sending feature.

Yes, and in fact it’s worse than your linked page suggests. I was happy to receive email and not send. So that free trial would have been forever perfect for me. But after a few months my login creds mysteriously quit working. No warning and no msg after the fact to tell me why my #onionmail.org account was deleted.

It’s a dick move because people rely on email for important tasks. It’s fair enough to have limitations, but concealing the limitations is off.

fwiw, here is an emacs version:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11

I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.

I get rid of them pretty quickly by saying I have no bank account. I might start adding to that “take cryptocurrency?” so they leave with the idea that maybe they should be open to cryptocurrency.

@youmaynotknow is spot on. But consider this a very basic primer on just a small fraction of privacy abuse by banks:

• 24 banking problems solved by cryptocurrency that Bruce Schneier does not know about

So there’s 22 privacy abuses by banks to get you started. And that just barely scratches the surface.

You can somewhat ignore paragraphs 15 and 23 in terms of privacy. OTOH privacy is hand-in-hand with control and paragraphs 15 & 23 reflect control being in the wrong hands.

Banks abuse our privacy in countless ways. This could fill a book. This policy amounts to forced banking. I boycott banks. Banks have us by the balls and they abuse that power. A bank recently told me (in effect) to fuck off if I don’t have a mobile phone number to give them.

It’s impossible to define the amount in relative terms such as “average EU monthly salary +25%”,

It’s not impossible. Indexes are published. This is what they do with rent in places where rent is controlled. Landlords cannot increase rent more than an index. So they have to do the math. And in this case it’s not even a variable baseline like rent, it’s fixed, so the calculation can also be published so people need not do any math.

That’s net (take-home pay), not gross. Tax is high enough that you need to double that figure (€4,400) to get the gross pay. And just wait till you account for inflation, which the EU cash limits apparently fail to account for.

this poll shows it’s non-partisan:

https://layer8.space/@hyakinthos/112554837920009346

The left respects privacy far more than the right. But the left also has that high-taxation tendency. The outcome of that tug-of-war within left-leaning people results in ~73% embracing cash – just like the conservatives who don’t give a shit about privacy but have contempt for tax.

Beware on your next trip to Netherlands, where some bars refuse cash and conceal their contempt for cash (reference)

I just linked your post from that one because it fits well with the story.

(edit) BTW, I would like to see your workmate’s story published in a blog that serves better as a reference. It needs more exposure in a venue that’s not quasi temporary. I would even print hardcopies of it to distribute to cashless bar owners. So a nicely typeset PDF would be useful.

What country was that? I heard about a Belgian who tried to withdraw €10k from her bank account. They refused and also called the police who interrogated her and made a report. Belgian banks have cash withdrawal limits written in the contract. Even pulling out €3k raises eyebrows in Belgium. So withdrawing €30k trouble-free would probably require withdrawing €2.5k once per week over the span of 12 weeks. Is the car seller willing to hold the car for a buyer that long?

That’s not because of the cash. Even white collar workers getting paid electronically get audited because Belgium has a very high audit rate. I heard the probability of getting audited in Belgium is around 50%. Belgian auditors are extremely ambitious and highly motivated. They are employed in high numbers. The only way to avoid being audited in Belgium is to not work in Belgium.

This depends on the industry. Domestic workers and builders are often paid in cash in Europe. Belgium even writes it in law that cash wages are prohibited if you work in an industry where that is uncommon. Strange (and discriminatory) law, but indeed white collar workers are legally blocked from cash payment while other industries are grandfathered.

Indeed national laws don’t generally limit p2p cash, but the EU law encroaches on that AFAICT.

Enforceability varies depending on the scenario. Some countries have law that holds employers accountable for tax evaded by workers. Employers obviously won’t gamble, so they refuse to pay cash and cryptocurrency wages because they are scared shitless of being accountable for an employee’s evasion.

I demanded cryptocurrency payment and my employer refused on that basis. I intended to continue declaring it properly and just wanted a bit of freedom from bank dependency, but nothing could overcome the employer’s fears.

Cashier’s checks existed in Belgium a few years ago but I heard they are under fire and will be discontinued at some point.

Personal checks seem to be non-existent but I heard they can be requested but the banks give some resistance and try to steer people away from it. They only work domestically. I think if you gave a Belgian personal check to a Belgian, they would not generally know what to do with it.

Impulsive donations have been relatively killed off because cash donations are banned (I think because scammers impersonate charities). So that leaves check and electronic payment. Oxfam does not (AFAIK) carry payment terminals. Checks would make sense, but they are taboo. So they have to ask for a bank transfer, which gives donors a chance to be lazy and forget about it.

The Geldmaat website states that debit cards need to be Maestro or Mastercard and that credit cards can be Mastercard and Visa. I’m surprised the Visa debit card worked at all in a Geldmaat, because as far as I can tell it shouldn’t.

One of the (otherwise helpless) bankers I spoke to said Visa is probably not accepted by Geldmaat. I thought the banker had to be wrong but maybe they meant to say visa debit does not work. Yet I have a receipt from a functional Geldmaat machine which says “visa debit” in a field named “app. label”. Then at the bottom of the receipt it (incorrectly) says “credit card account … credit limit …” which actually reflects the card balance.

Some point of sale terminals are said to only work with visa credit or visa debit, but then I’ve had banks tell me their cards act like what the machine wants it to be. I’m fuzzy on the details. There are situations where you have to choose “credit” or “debit” on the terminal, and the bank says I can choose credit even if it’s debit, and vice versa. So it’s hard to pin down what’s going on. I don’t even get why the distinction between the two exists at the network API level. It’s not the business of the merchant or the ATM to know those details.

I can only imagine that perhaps it’s there for casino situations. A credit card holder once went to LasVegas with a credit card from a region where gambling is illegal. One of the laws was that it’s illegal to collect on a gambling debt. So he took a cash advance on his credit card inside a casino, lost it all, then returned home and told the bank it’s a gambling debt, get lost. My understanding of the story is that he got off the hook for the debt on that basis. But I wonder if that’s why this distinction exists on the card networks.

Another theory is that credit cards have more buyer’s protections and higher fees to the merchant and so some merchants don’t like that and want to insist on debit cards. But the ATM seems like the reverse of that.

Anyway, maybe not all Geldmaat machines are the same.

I appreciate your insight. Perhaps some of the refusals is related to visa debit incompatibility.

Withdrawing money from Dutch banks is effectively free (that’s what the banks charge you for) so a commercial party putting down ATMs in public can’t make money from the vast majority of potential customers.

Well free to the customer but the ATM likely still profits. My bank eats the atm fee but they have no deal to hide the fee from the customer. So I agree to the fee, see the fee on the receipt, and the fee appears on the bank statement followed by a credit back in the amount of the fee. EU accounts probably just hide the fee from the customer otherwise ATMs would not be sustainable.

update

This page says:

You can make a cash withdrawal at every geldmaat ATM using your Maestro or Visa debit card and/or your MasterCard or Visa credit card.

(emphasis mine)