EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027
86 comments
·May 5, 2025neiman
tpm
> I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
alexey-salmin
Not OP but in a similar situation. In online banks there's nowhere to upload these temporary certificates, they accept a limited number of options (passeport, residence card etc) and temporary certificate printed on an A4 paper isn't one of them. You can try sending it via email to customer support, I did it with around 8 different banks and Revolut was the only one to reply and open an account for me after the manual review. Another one was PCS that didn't even ask for residence permit but then it went bust, and it took around 6 months to get the money back.
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms.
egorfine
I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
tpm
Maybe this is a dumb question, but I am trying to understand this situation. There are still some physical bank branches and I assume at least some banks will open an account for you with that TPS if you visit a branch. Is that not correct? That way you would have access to at least some financial services, if not those where as you write (remote) KYC is needed.
soco
I assume there will never be any implementation side to focus on, if there's no legal side to push for it. Because as we can clearly see around us, the tech boys don't give a zit on your accesses and privacy and rights, so they have to be pushed to care.
cedws
Monero in particular absolutely terrifies governments and financial institutions - you can tell because it's been banned and delisted practically everywhere. This gives me great confidence in it. Not as a speculative asset, but as a means of having truly private transactions.
lawn
In a way Monero is more a cryptocurrency than Bitcoin.
A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.
lordofgibbons
Bitcoin advocates pivoted on Bitcoin being a currency after it, to be brutally honest, failed to function as a currency. Last few times I transacted BTC, the fees were anywhere between $5 and $15 and the transaction times were more than 1hr. Not to mention the whole world can see all of your transactions.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
sshine
The cost for a Bitcoin transaction today is $0.96.
The lowest daily average cost per transaction in the last month was $0.81, and the highest was $2.52.
longitudinal93
My last Bitcoin transaction cost me $0.20 and took 30 minutes vs. $30 and 4 days with probing questions for a commensurate value wire .
kreetx
Today, Bitcoin is a scarce asset similar to gold and wants to become the global reserve currency (because it can't be devalued).
The fast-cheap-private part may or may not be fixed at some point, especially the fast-cheap, or other currencies may help with it.
bgwalter
The fact that Bitcoin itself has never been banned strongly suggests that it was government approved from the beginning or even developed at the NSA.
The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.
What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...
bilekas
Have you read the article ? The currencies are not being BANNED, simply anonymous accounts are, this is standard practice in financial institutions where you're required to Know Your Customer (KYC) and provide Anti Money Laundering (AML) provisions.
bgwalter
I have. Handling Monero, presumably for real currency conversions, is banned. If that were done for Bitcoin worldwide, the price would collapse, because it is no longer useful for, e.g., sanctions evasion.
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
This statement is walked back later.
plsbenice34
Cointelegraph very often exaggerates and writes in an inaccurate way, it should never be used as a reliable source of information. You can see the real information here which makes it clear that it only applies to exchanges: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
perlgeek
I wonder what the impact will be on ransomware attacks.
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
reginald78
My understanding is most ransoms are already paid in bitcoin. (or some other public ledger coin?) Privacy coins would probably be preferable for criminals to receive but they aren't as easy to purchase as bitcoin which I'd imagine significantly reduces the likelihood they get paid at all. Since most of these ransomware groups are hosted in countries with uncooperative governments the public ledger isn't really an impediment anyway.
amarcheschi
As of now paying for a ransomware in btc is still quite hard, at least in europe.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
xyzal
I wonder what benefit to society might having a shadow financial system bring? I can't think of any, except for financing entities operating outside lawful limits.
plsbenice34
Wikileaks had to rely on cryptocurrency for funding and donations could be tracked otherwise. Hong Kong protestors were tracked by looking at their purchases of public transport tickets. Canada froze the bank accounts of those involved in protests also. From this I see a trend that shows it is critical for democracy, don't you?
93po
i think the whole point for many is freedom from tyranny. just because there are laws around how you're allowed to store and move around things that you own doesn't mean those laws are morally or ethically well-founded.
kreetx
"Tyranny" has a negative connotation to it, but cultures vary, laws are not universal, and also people have different values - if you live somewhere where you can't otherwise transact, a private cryptocurrency may be a way out for you.
karel-3d
...on exchanges.
They don't ban the coins and their private usages, they ban them on exchanges.
plsbenice34
Based on all the other comments it seems like nobody else understands this. Funny.
People will just (legally) use decentalised exchanges to convert between monero and bitcoin so it won't have much impact
out_of_protocol
How do you do that on DEX?
plsbenice34
There are several models.
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
crimsoneer
Wasn't this essentially illegal already due to KYC regulations?
omeid2
No, because KYC is about the customer, not product. In the same way that you're not required to sell only trackable microcontrollers for example, only that you can show who you sold them to, not where they went onwards.
actionfromafar
I believe it was this: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1114/oj/eng
JSR_FDED
What are the implications of that?
RalfWausE
If you stay within the crypto-economy (e.g. buy stuff with coins from places who also only deal with coins) nothing prevents you from doing so.
alexey-salmin
Right, and laws like this slowly severe the ties between the crypto-economy and the real world.
In the end you'll be able to exchange coins for other coins but by itself it's meaningless.
null
93po
soooo we need blockchain based exchanges now? haha
bilekas
> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
alexey-salmin
> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
OutOfHere
Moreover, cash is subject to both physical seizure and substantial monetary inflation.
giancarlostoro
> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.
bilekas
> I want fully private transactions over the internet
And you can still do this, the AML is related to the using the Exchanges themselves ?
sshine
> I want fully private transactions over the internet
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
soco
I wonder, how private is hawala? Anyone knowing it enough to chime in?
_ink_
What does this mean for cold or hardware wallets?
braiamp
Less than nothing. Only applies on exchanges. If you manage to transfer such things in the public ledger, then there's no problem.
jmcgough
[flagged]
JoshTriplett
The EU's legislation has been decidedly mixed, and not an unalloyed good. Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply. I had some hope of the EU being that, but both the US and the EU have trended towards homogenization. I wonder if, in a hundred years, the EU government will claim as much power at the EU-wide level as the US federal government.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
tremon
by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
pjc50
So the thing about physical cash is that handling it gets (roughly) linearly harder with the amount. Whether that's coins, notes, silver, gold or whatever. It is relatively easy to hand over $100 for private purposes, but it is seriously difficult to move $100,000,000 without attracting attention.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
delusional
Do you have any example of when these powers were abused?
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
JoshTriplett
It's a component of pervasive surveillance.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
7bit
> Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply.
ROFL! Are you suggesting there is no framework? Do the basic research before spouting your propaganda!
There's your framework:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/infographic/legislative-proce...
And there are directives, that leave a lot of room how to the EU countries on how to implement them.
soulofmischief
Oh like Chat Control? Don't be mistaken, most countries in the EU ultimately do not respect your privacy and wish to have access to your private correspondence, in addition to preventing you from carrying out private digital transactions, just as we have been doing with physical money for thousands of years.
rightbyte
In the sense "important privacy laws" does not imply pro-privacy?
7bit
No, it means that privacy on cryptocurrency is the major driver of corruptions and tax fraud, and it's important to remove any privacy around these topics.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
preisschild
This is an anti-privacy law, though. Anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero allow you to truly privately transfer money.
dist-epoch
Like the cookie-law. An amazing success, I'm reminded daily about it.
nagisa
I mildly recall them looking to do something about the sort of malicious compliance that cookie banners are, but I haven't been following that work too closely.
delusional
The banners are not mandated by law. That's an implementation choice. Websites chose to show you annoying banners to make you annoyed with the law. They could just not track you.
glimshe
Yes, the vast majority of the websites are just being annoying because they are childish. It has nothing to do with the law.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
omeid2
The Cookie law works great. Every time you click "Essentials only" you're denying to be tracked.
FirmwareBurner
[flagged]
LeafItAlone
>criminals
By definition, they are criminals because they are breaking the law. And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for.
Remember, it was tax evasion that the government was able to convict Al Capone on, not his other activities. And also a simple traffic stop for an expired registration or inactive taillight that has put many possessors of a small amount of marijuana in jail.
bilekas
> And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for.
The EU doesn't have a government in the sense you're talking to, it has regulatory bodies and a council, the individual countries make up the enactment of their laws and regulations in the EU, there is Interpol and Europol but these work usually in conjunction with a countries governments on large scale/impact crimes where cross border jurisdiction is required.
Lariscus
Yes and if they are caught they will be prosecuted and punished like with any other ban. Converting a significant amount of Monero into actual money will become much harder if its illegal. This will reduce availability of such services and make privacy coins less attractive to criminals which is exactly what the ban is aiming for.
troupo
What are the crime stats in the EU compared (apples-to-apples) to the US? And what is the prison population.
harperlee
[flagged]
dp-hackernews
Do you think having an argument will make any difference either way?
"Nothing us either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
That's just the inherent diversity of thinking across the whole of civilization and time, and is as controllable as the weather.
FirmwareBurner
What I think is that your argument is in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
The governments, being useless and focusing on the wrong things, are banning objectively non-nefarious objects (ninja swords, anonymous coins) that can be use for good by good actors (cutting stuff in the garden, sending money in privacy) but are sometimes used for evil by bad actors (murder, money laundering), like many other things.
How can rape and murder ever be used for good by the general public? Did you ever meet someone in need of a legit rape/murder in the name of good? How can you possibly make such a comparison? Honestly!
Banning a tool doesn't stop the criminals from committing crimes that are already illegal, it's just removing a tool from the law abiding citizen.
lordofgibbons
These are the real Cypherpunk coins. Specially Monero. The premise behind Cryptocurrencies, (before crypto-bros joined), were all about distributed control, privacy, and censorship avoidance.
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
delusional
Finally. It's a failed experiment by grifters and suckers. It had it's chance at being useful, time to get it out of public conscience so we can work on actual issues.
soulofmischief
What is, exactly? Decentralized currency?
denkmoon
Monero does -exactly- what it is designed to do and is used by plenty of people for real transactions not just speculation. Grifters always gonna grift.
93po
two button meme. first button: bitcoin is worthless and stupid and a failed experiment and needs to be banned. second button: bitcoin is successfully enabling billions of dollars in transactions of things i disapprove of and needs to be banned
vitarnixofntrnt
[dead]
I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".