Coinbase: "Notice of oppressive surveillance proposals"

Today, Coinbase send this email to its EU customers:

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`Dear Coinbase Customer,

On 31 March, the EU Parliament will vote on its proposal for a new crypto surveillance regime. You may have already read the blog post from our Chief Legal Officer, Paul Grewal, about making your voice heard. We believe it is especially important for our EU customers to know exactly what is happening and how this may affect our relationship to you.

The latest draft by Parliament of the Transfer of Funds Regulation treats crypto, and every person who holds crypto, differently from the treatment of fiat:

Every crypto transaction (and not just those with a 1,000 euro threshold, as is the case with fiat) would be “travel rule eligible,” which requires financial institutions to pass on certain information to the next financial institution.

Any time you receive 1,000 euros or more in crypto from a self-hosted wallet, Coinbase will be required to report you to the authorities. This applies even if there is no indication of suspicious activity.

Before you can send or receive crypto from a self-hosted wallet, Coinbase will be required to collect, verify, and report information on the self-hosted wallet before the transfer is allowed.

There is no precedence for this kind of surveillance regime. If the EU required your bank to report all of its customer’s transactions anytime they were involved in a transaction over 1,000 euros, or to report non-customer’s private information any time a customer interacted with them, the banks would push back. That’s what we are doing now.

If this concerns you, you can contact your Member of the European Parliament by visiting this site.

Here is the link to the coinbase webform that lets you contact EU Parliament in 20 seconds: https://p2a.co/0QrnHj8

Edit 2: I can imagine the link is maybe region-locked (some report 403).

If you are a EU citizen, I suggest you use it.

Edit 1: The email seems to be legit. DKIM, SPF & DMARC all 'PASS'. (the link is from the email)

Edit 3: There is another form posted by Patrick Hansen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/paddi_hansen/status/1508797923445854209

The form is: p2a.co/o3GBJsd (here 6 different members of EP are beeing send to?)

Edit 4: There may be a problem with autofill these forms according to Patrick Hansen:

If you don't autofill but type your name and email and seems to work.

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