Bitcoin Forum

A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000.

Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture.

All of this under the farcically broad umbrella of fighting terrorism.

Civil forfeiture grants the government robbery writ large: your cash, property, and assets can be stolen completely sans due process, your guilt — frequently pertaining to drug ‘crimes’ — matters not.

A court verdict of not guilty doesn’t even guarantee the return of State-thefted property.

In fact, the government can seize virtually whatever it wants if it so much as suspects some of your assets might have been acquired through or used in the commission of even lesser crimes.

For some time, a war on cash has been brewing behind the closed doors of government, and — although officials prefer to claim counterfeiting, terrorism, and money laundering as the impetus for asset tracking — in actuality, physical currency facilitates black market and untaxed transactions, and, most imperatively to the U.S., cannot be thefted under civil asset forfeiture laws as easily as money exchanged digitally.

Characterized as an effort to “to improve the prohibitions on money laundering, and for other purposes,” the bill severely curtails the right to travel freely, without undue hindrance, as travelers with more than $10,000 in assets — including those held digitally, like Bitcoin — must file a report with the U.S. government.

Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years.

To be clear, the State wants to write a permission slip to seize all of your assets — bank accounts, including, specifically, “safety deposit boxes,” prepaid cards, gift cards, prepaid phones, prepaid coupons, cryptocurrencies, all of it — even for being remiss in reporting what you’re traveling with.

Considering one’s digital assets veritably follow wherever that travel takes them, a cryptocurrency portfolio would theoretically have to be reported each time that person travels outside the confines of the U.S.

Of course, the legislation in actuality just amends laws pertaining to assets and travel already considered dictatorial — right now, failure to fill out the form carries not just the penalty of seizure, but a sentence of up to five years behind bars.

“And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments,’” Simon Black of SovereignMan.com reports.

“Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc.

“Now we can add cash to that list.”

But it wouldn’t just be the government hawkishly surveilling your every transaction, as, essentially, all retailers would be roped into becoming State spies — any business selling gift or prepaid cards would be required to report those, too.

Worse — and in defiance of current structures pertaining to digital currency — the government wishes to somehow require issuers of cryptocurrencies into its abhorrent, ostensive money-laundering police spy ring.

According to the legislation, reports Smaulgold.com, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection must, within 18 months of the legislation’s passage, devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy […]

“The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.”

Travelers possessing assets, precious metals, and accounts in excess of $10,000 held outside the United States, however, would not be required to declare those to the government — perhaps leaving an albeit sketchy option for those wary of unscrupulous authorities.

While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release.

Welcome to America, where your assets are literally the government’s business, and freedom is anything but free.

http://www.anonews.co/senate-bill-cash/

Of course, it's not unexpected at all.

Government always want more power. They want to have full control over people's wealth, and to do that they can't just say give me all your money, salary, wages and i'll redistribute it. Then they'll be accused of being communists. The subtle way is to obviously do this by tracking people's wealth, make sure that nothing is out of their sight, and make sure that everyone stays within limits, or they get a knock on their door.

Unfortunately, this is how it is. But storing your wealth in crypto will ensure that you don't get tracked, or at least as easily as cash. AGCs are a huge problem though, a lot of them are indeed being used for money laundering. But there is really no need for the gvmt to chip in on this issue, it's amazon's problem.

While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release.

Your tax dollars @ work.

Wouldn't it be nice if tax dollars went towards bettering society rather than propping up the corrupt, dysfunctional, standards of elites.

Paypal, police, DEA and others already confiscate money without just cause. This bill would give the state the power to confiscate any crypto for no reason whatsoever and imprison those who didn't report their crypto holdings so that the state could steal it.

I'm still confused as to why they go after prepaid sources of money, though. I guess you could re-sell them for cash since they provide value for owners of the cards, but it doesn't really make sense as to why they care about them so much. It's not like a terrorist is going to be able to buy a kalashnikov with a wal-mart gift card (although they might be able to if the demand is there).

Right now, there seems to be a jerk reactions from the government on matters of crime and terrorism. While it is true that Bitcoin or nay cryptocurrency for that matter can be utilized for terrorism activities we should also realize that any form of money or fiat money can be used for the same purpose.

While I personally agree that we have to address the terrorism head on we should do it without getting a heavy collateral damage on the freedom and liberty of the ordinary citizens. Without getting into a certain balance, the solutions can result into more problems.

There are no easy answers for problems affecting our society for now but we should always think many times if the supposed answers we are offering will not kill a blossoming industry.

There is already a thread on this.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1972056.msg19623419

I don't understand why good threads on forums are ignored while the generic and pointless threads reach 50+ pages.

It seems like an industry standard.

I'd really like to know how the US government plans to follow up their intention to "seize" cryptocurrency. Crack the private keys from their citizen's wallets? And how would they propose to utilise these seized assets? Exchange it for their USD?

It's still a bill and is still up for review. If it is logical then it may be approved but looking at it, it could be damaging to the public and might be revised. A law needs to be fair to every party and should not be confiscatory in nature. I guess regulation is expected and inevitable. Being decentralized, a feature of most crypto, doesn't mean it will be immune to regulation of the state where the user belongs to.

That is good for bitcoin, now the people will select between dollar or btc. Time to make your bets ;)

Solution:

1.  Buy a TREZOR.
2.  Create a load of hidden wallets behind additional passphrases.
3.  When they look at it, they won't see that you're travelling with >$10,000.

http://i63.tinypic.com/16bkdx4.jpg

If nothing else, the search and seizure part of this bill which claims the government has the authority to confiscate crypto without due process has to be anti-constitutional.

I would have to think it won't pass on that basis alone.

The problem is the patriot act and other legislature have eroded the 4th amendment and set a bad legal precedent for laws ignoring it.

The amendments are going to be twisted, because they're not searching in houses for bitcoins but rather for anyone travelling with bitcoins in their laptops. So they'll probably say it's just to strengthen the border control etc.

In the past, laws that outlaw gold holdings has been implemented. So don't expect everything to be done the way it should be, the president can sign an executive order much like the last one(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102) that said you can't hold private gold.

Though the law also targets gift cards, which is a very important revenue source for big corporations, making me think that the bill probably won't get passed.