Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/humanrights@crazypeople.online/t/4433054

Belgium plans to do away with paper cheques. Apparently no one is fighting this. The eagerness to do away with paper cheques can only be attributed to addiction to convenience without regard to the consequences.

Once paper cheques are gone, there will be no way to survive without banks. Even if you walk away from your job and go on social aid, the social aid has no way to reach you without a bank account. Paper cheques are the sole means having personal autonomy from banks.

Some pensioners still receive their pension payment as a paper cheque, which they can cash without having a bank account. Belgium is taking this away.

I am going to refrain from commenting before requesting a further explanation on why this is a bad thing.

This already happened in my country and nobody complained and felt disserved.

It’s in the post:

Once paper cheques are gone, there will be no way to survive without banks.

When paper cheques are gone, from that moment you are forever forced to patronise a bank. You lose your right to autonomy and your right to boycott banks. The banks have been gradually becoming more and more enshitified as they impose closed-source smartphone apps and Google dependencies. With forced banking, there is no control on enshitification in banking.

This community is about being able to live an analog lifestyle. When the digital transformation produces shitty service, it’s important to be able to walk away from it. Killing paper cheques is a trap.

It does not need to be.

My country - Portugal - has a residual use of cheques and pensions have ceased to be paid through it.

The government established, through force of law, a bank account ensuring minimal banking services to all, including a card, valid for payments and withdrawals on the national network. The account has a fixed maintenance cost of less than €5, per year. Every single banking institution on the country has to offer it, no exceptions. And because the account is geared towards minimal functionalities and services, banks have admited it is run at a loss; they can't upsell.

An individual using such an account can receive their pension, withdraw all of it on the day it is deposited, and forget about it. It is that simple. Many older or people that distrust banks do as such.

Basic banking is part of the problem. It’s because of basic banking that forced-banking (your loss of autonomy) becomes possible.

Basic banking in Belgium is much worse. What you are paying annually in Portugal for basic banking is a /monthly/ cost in Belgium.

Every single banking institution on the country has to offer it, no exceptions.

Even digital banks where customers cannot function without a recent Android? Even the expensive private banks that normally require a minimum balance of €100k?

In Belgium, there are banks that say “our application form to open a basic account is only on our website”, thus offline people (and Tor users) are excluded from those banks. There is (incidentally?) a Belgian bank that has a paper application form for a basic account, but then we are stuck with that bank. I doubt the digital banks offer basic accounts, but it might be interesting to try to force one of them to open a basic account without using their shitty app.

An individual using such an account can receive their pension, withdraw all of it on the day it is deposited, and forget about it. It is that simple. Many older or people that distrust banks do as such.

Belgium banned all cash transactions on basic accounts. So Belgians pay about 10× more for a crippled purely cashless service. When Belgians are ultimately finally forced to lick the boots of a bank, perhaps Portugal is a lesser of evils to open a basic account. I suppose a Belgian could use an ATM in Belgium to draw money from a Portuguese basic account?

Is it possible to deposit cash into a basic account in Portugal?

How do paper cheques work without a bank? As far as I know banks are involved at some point.

You can use the CSMB account as any other account but it is only valid for people living in the country. It was created for who need or wants minimal bank involvement. The card is only useable in Portugal and has no Visa or Mastercard connection; it can not be used for internacional purchases, although that will probably be solved through the eEuro.

This is the page for our regulator on the said account. There is a PDF available for download I assume you can translate through Deepl or a similar website.

The last time I read on it, all banks were required to offer such account. The banks you mention - neo-banks and fortune managers - are not usually on the bracket of clients you are considering.

Belgians can cash a cheque at the post office without having a bank account. It has become gratis just recently as well, so the bank does not make a dime on that transaction. The post office subcontracts to a bank to do the electronic portion of the transaction but it imposes no bank patronage on the recipient. It is currently the sole way to avoid patronage of banks and keep your autonomy in belgium because paying salaries in cash was banned in Belgium.

Doesn't that just means that the company running your postal service is also running a bank? At least that's how it works with the German Postbank.

edit: it does. The BPost Group also runs BPost Bank.

As with is in Portugal. Our national post moved so much money it was, at some point, privatized and split into postal service and a bank, so that the money could be handled according to new regulation.

You can use the CSMB account as any other account but it is only valid for people living in the country.

Oof -- that violates the core purpose of the EU. The whole point is for Europeans to be on equal footing with respect to commerce. All European banks discriminate on the basis of nationality but in principle only against non-Europeans. Are you certain a Belgian cannot open a bank account in Portugal? This makes the prospect of forced-banking even more oppressive than I realised.

Bpost banque subcontracts to BNP Parabas. Using a paper cheque to get access to cash does not require patronising either of them. You do not pay them a dime and you do not sign a contract. The profitable data they get from the person presenting the cheque is minimal. There is no interesting data to abuse or exfiltrate in a breach.

When you send a bank transfer, the money is in limbo for a period of time. The money leaves the payer’s account and sits in the bank’s own account where the bank earns interest. After some time, the money eventually finally moves into the recipient’s account. That limbo time is quite profitable for the bank. So the bank tries to keep that limbo time as long as legally possible. The bank loves your patronage.

With paper cheques, the money is in the posession of the payer up until the cheque is furnished. At that moment, cash is paid to the recipient. There is no profitable limbo time in this case.

Have you read the document?

I just skimmed it and apparently it is now valid throughout the entire EU. Which is quite nice.

Someone interested in opening an account needs to approach any institution authorized to receive deposits. Which is essentially every bank operating in this barbarian country. It is up to the prospective customer to choose one.

Basic banking in Belgium is much worse. What you are paying annually in Portugal for basic banking is a /monthly/ cost in Belgium.

Then the issue is not the cheques or them being suppressed. It's Belgian legislators being morons and/or assholes. That's what you should protest against because no paper cheque on earth will make your politicians suddenly more competent or less of an asshole. Note that we our own incompetent assholes here in France too, not pointing any blaming finger toward Belgium ;)

Also don't forget the coming Digital Euro. For a while it will be optional, look how practical that is come try it, but their objective is most certainly to get rid of any form of cash, aka physical money.

I have heared about bankless card (basically, you can reload them at tabac/press shops). I am not sure how the service work in France, but there could be one similar in Belgium. Also, I am not sure how you would link that to your salary, social security things and other third parties.

Else you could try to look at how to create a minimal mutual/associative bank. I am sure it is a crazy thing to try and it requires even more than a lot of work, but it would be beautiful to make exist a bank which aim would only be to let people access their money (without profits, just a share of the costs).

Then the issue is not the cheques or them being suppressed. It's Belgian legislators being morons and/or assholes. That's what you should protest against

You’re not talking about the right to autonomy. You’re talking about saving money. Paper cheques give autonomy that cannot be bought. If anything, the high cost of basic banking serves to justify the importance to our human right to autonomy from banks.

If basic banking were €100 per month, it would be much harder to defend forced-banking because people who don’t give a shit about rights, just money, would also oppose forced banking on the basis of cost alone.

(edit) I can understand why the French would fixate on cost though. French banks were found to be the most expensive in Europe, at least at one point. But if they hold on to the paper cheque, they would be due some respect for that.

no paper cheque on earth will make your politicians suddenly more competent or less of an asshole. Note that we our own incompetent assholes here in France too, not pointing any blaming finger toward Belgium ;)

The paper cheque gives us a degree of autonomy regardless of the competency of the politicians. A paper cheque gives access to cash without having a bank account. With paper cheques in play, I don’t give a shit how much politicians fuck up banking because I have the liberty to walk away from it. That’s the most important because banks have turned to shit and they will continue to worsen (in part due to bad policy).

Also don't forget the coming Digital Euro. For a while it will be optional, look how practical that is come try it, but their objective is most certainly to get rid of any form of cash, aka physical money.

We will deal with that slippery slope if it turns out to be a slippery slope. At the moment, the proposed legal tender law establishes that the digital euro cannot replace or threaten cash. It’s far from being a threat at the moment. The fire to put out is the loss of the sole payment instrument that gives us autonomy.

The doc is in Portugese and translation has become a shitshow. Google and many others have ramped up the anti-bot (which is effectively anti-human). Assume you can get past Cloudflare, they charge a premium or give you enshitified service with limited amounts of text quota. You have to translate one paragraph at a time across multiple different front-ends. I translate docs locally instead but don’t have language models for Portuguese. Can’t be bothered with all the hoops.

You first said only Portuguese residents have access to basic accounts there. Then you seem to imply that it’s open to all. So I’m confused about the situation there.

Use Deepl, please. If I can access the website without friction, you can also.

5000 characters at a time. I'd advise starting by the bulleted index, locate the relevant part to your doubts and read through it.

DeepL was good in its infancy years ago. The they turned it to unusable shit with broken Javascript that broke it for years. They eventually fixed the js, but then they put it on Cloudflare, so a US tech giant who sees ⅓ of all web traffic in the world sees everyones sensitive DeepL translations. DeepL eventually whitelisted Tor, but they maintained the deceiving lie that their service is “secure”. It could not be less secure by showing all the translations to a US corporation proven untrustworthy by various scandals. You should be condemning #DeepL.

That said, the doc you reference is not sensitive. So deepl is viable. However, that’s another shit show. The national bank of portugal should be embarrassed that they use Cloudflare for their own website. Thus what should be a public resource is access restricted (as they do not whitelist Tor). At the same time, they share any sensitive data traversing their site with Cloudflare. That should be investigated for GDPR violations. Anyway, archive.org should be the refuge in this case. So I went there. And wtf… Cloudflare also blocked archive.org from accessing the national bank, FFS. As if the world’s most important public library is a malicious entity. The embarrassment goes on. So then I dug into older archives of that page. Found one where archive.org was able to cache the page successfully. I clicked to download the PDF. But the link lies. It’s actually javascript embedded in HTML masquerading as a PDF. So I could not actually get the PDF. It was all a waste of time.

The site for BdP is a publicly accessible one. There is nothing there that is classified or sensible. Your concerns with safety pass as out of proportion in this case.

You want me to upload the file here, so you can access it?

If a bank account is mandatory, it should be part of the government, not a private company.

I was able to reach the site on the 3rd attempt. Deepl rejects the 71-page PDF with:

“This file exceeds your plan’s character limit. Try a shorter file or remove it.”

It has 122726 characters, which is about 26 times the deepl quota. If you have an English version I would be interested. But I don’t think you can post PDFs in a thread.

If you're really interest in reading the document, you'll find a way. You made clear you are technically capable.

I'd advise on focusing your attention on part one of the document, from page seven to page thirteen.