Woah, good digs! You should be a comedian when you grow up. But please, don’t try to become a math or economics teacher; that’s not your thing.

You can go to the issuing bank and cash a check without a dime to your name and no account whatsoever. If you go to another bank, a check cashing business, or even a casino¹, the equation changes. Different regions are different. In Belgium, you can cash a cheque at the post office banque without having an account or a dime to your name, and also pay nothing² for the service.

¹ Some casinos will not only cash your check for free but also give you rewards for cashing a check in their casino, knowing that you will most likely give them some gambling action.

² The fee in Belgium used to be €4 but that was recently eliminated.

(edit)

I've never had an etransfer take longer than 5 minutes to complete.

You’ve never done an ACH wire transfer? Those can take 3 days, and this his how most electronic paychecks are paid in the US -- or so I thought. Has that changed? Are people using Zelle for paychecks now?

That's why banks will only cash a cheque if you have money to cover it in your account.

That sounds more like a security mechanism. How does that compensate the interest deficeit during the uncleared time? If you have money in your account, the bank is already getting interest on that to some extent. I don’t see how cashing a check could increase that.

When I deposit a check, the bank places a hold for days to ensure the funds actually exist.

Indeed checks should be cashed. When a check is cashed, the institution that supplied the cash is actually at a loss because the cash is given as an advance until the check clears.

(edit) Is Zelle how you receive paychecks?

Is it ok if I mention the post with your nickname?

sure

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought cheques required a bank to use?

Depends on the kind of cheque. Belgium has five different kinds of cheques, some of which must be deposited into a bank account. Some cheques can be cashed, in which case you do not need an account and do not need to patronise a bank. You are purely a burden to them in this case. In this case, the cheque is a cash access mechanism that does not require licking any boots.

Cash is the only option which doesn't.

Cash gives the greatest autonomy but receiving a salary in cash has been banned in Belgium for like decade or so now. So the paper cheque is currently the sole mechanism for autonomy in Belgium.