The governments were always scared of Bitcoin, they were worried about losing their control over the flow of money, in turn economy. At first, they didn’t want to acknowledge its existence, then they tried banning it, but none of these attempts were successful in stopping bitcoin’s ascent. As more people began to use it, they were able to find new applications of the technology. Now Bitcoin is too big and the Blockchain technology is too valuable to be shut down. So, the next logical step is to control it.
According to an anonymous source on Reddit, who claims to be a bank employee has posted about an alleged memo received by his bank from the financial institute instructing them to report any transaction over 1000 euros as these transactions are assumed to be connected to bitcoin.
He also mentioned that the memo included a report issued by Europol mentioning about 84 accounts being monitored and 52 more being under investigation. The memo also makes a mention of many exchanges reportedly refusing to cooperate with the authorities. In order to support his claims, the anonymous Reddit user had also shared a link to one of the reports published by the Financial Intelligence Unit of Netherlands.
Banks were also provided with IBAN numbers of accounts belonging to few bitcoin exchanges, so that banks can flag high value transactions originating for these accounts. It includes the likes of Bitstamp and Kraken. Any transaction over 1000 euros originating from or terminating at these accounts have to be reported by the banks. Similarly, like before, the banks are supposed to report accounts with annual transactions over 10,500 euros over the salary.
It is hard to verify the credibility of the source who posted the information on Reddit, but it is quite believable as the governments have done such things in the past and continue to do so.