Bitcoin Forum

There is an entire industry handling trillions of various fiat currency.  Many companies and even entire countries specialize in this industry called asset protection.  Countless man hours and enormous amounts are spent creating off shore shell companies, trusts, and various other vehicles to shield money from seizure ranging from cases of simple judgements personal or business all the way to issues of protecting wealth in countries where politics play a big role in permitting or confiscating personal wealth.  A few good lessons on bitcoin security makes Switzerland and Cayman Islands obsolete.

Not really, a tax haven is still a tax haven. Its just the banks that live there won't have such a fun time. Although, corporations will probably still use them for the interest.

It's not just about taxes although that is one end of the spectrum.  Many other countries use "taxes" as political weapons like China, and Russia.  The bread and butter of asset protection business is setting up corporations, LLC, and trusts to defend against frivolous liability and other lawsuits.  Some examples are set up slip and fall or suing for pretend injuries in auto accidents.  Many lawyers who take up these cases work on a percentage basis and tend to avoid situations were collecting would be hard.  Collecting with bitcoin is impossible.

Not really, if you get a court order to cough up your Bitcoins you sort of have to.

"Sort of have to"?  Please describe the process by which you see this happening?  That's assuming one can prove that the coins in a certain address belong to a certain person or entity.

What Bitcoins? I lost my wallet.dat, it got corrupted years ago.
Bitcoin is the first wealth that is portable and reputable.

Kinda hard to say you don't have a physical asset (say gold) when they open the safe and it is there.  Kinda hard to move $1M in gold bullion out of the country (damn TSA metal detectors).

One of the main reason for converting gold to BTC is international portability.  With currency wars heating up as evidenced by the last "surprise" ECB rate cut, future capital controls in the "developed" nations are possible.

Torture.

Theoretically , it can't be done. The only case till now , shows it can be done. Irony isn't it?

Then they'll just take your physical assets. You can't claim you have nothing for them to take.

Well they might be doing that anyways but that is one asset they can't take.

I have hardly any physical assets now.

I just moved recently, and I limited myself to what would fit in my car in two trips.

Also one of those trips I brought 140 lbs worth of dogs with me, so my actual physical assets are no more than about what you can pack in 1.5 trips in a Focus.

With a bit of work, I could reduce my physical possessions even further to only what I could take with me on an international flight.

Location independence is a great thing, and it's possible now with Bitcoin in a way that has never been possible before.

If you are even as careless as someone who leaves his real-name E-mail address on a public website, then yes.... ::)

Really?  So you mean a court can order torture for someone not paying a collections bill?  What country do you live in.

Tax havens, offshore businesses and trusts etc are a lot more secure than Bitcoins I'm afraid to say, so there's no way they'll be driven out of business.

How are they more secure?  At the end of the day a bank account with money is always seizable.  Ask the people who held money in offshore Cyprus how secure that was and that's only the recent example.  Post WWII world is full of various nationalizations.

This could be partly true, but I think with it's volatility and newness, it's a long way from that. Additionally I'm not really worried about the people in that industry, they'll find something to do.

Don't compare Cyprus with Switzerland or other proper offshore locations. Also the naive on here assume that whats held in these locations is just cash, whereas there's far more held in other assets like properties, businesses and equities. No-one with any sense and money keeps it in cash, since the returns are so poor.

all of them here shortly

open your eyes man

depends on your definition of torture, but all the laws end up with a man pointing a gun at you, in the end you'll end up behind bars and we all know it's not a nice place to be.

This is getting off topic.  In current offshore asset protection torture would work as well.  @ex-trader please refresh my memory how well it worked out for clients of proper Swiss UBS when an employee stole all their records and sold them to Germany and USA.

noobs, how did you get past Newbie section? Such a dumb comment like this should kick you back in there. You reminded me of the kid in my 3rd grade. Hes fcking 12 yrs old.

So, which other industries has Bitcoin destroyed?

Bitcoin is generating new industries far more worthy of their existence than banks or governments.

Bitcoin is opening up the whole world which can trade freely without interference by the establishment.  There are countries, up till now, which could not trade freely, Bitcoin allows that.

You imply that no new technology should evolve because it will interfere with the status quo.  Should we continue to live with disfunctional systems that only benefit the minority?

You are using technology by coming to this forum, which not that many years ago people thought would be impossible.

Watch the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdbJP8Gxqog - Should this technology be abandoned?

The only way this planet is going to survive is by putting power in the hands of the majority, not the minority.

There's a big difference between using an offshore entity to legally keep your assets secure, well-managed and tax-efficient and using them to deliberately break the tax laws of your own country.

The clients of UBS and others that got caught did so quite rightly since they were breaking the law (by holding money and not declaring it to the US/other tax authorities as required).

Plausible deniability and the high rate of lost bitcoins by individuals means they'd have to torture a sizeable portion of the population, most of which never had any substantial amount of coins to begin with, to find the few people that have decent-sized hidden brainwallets (they can give up a smaller wallet as a ruse). That's the kind of thing governments can't get away with so easily, as tortured people tend to get rather crotchety.

You are mixing issues.  Without getting into a philosophical discussion about taxation I responded to your claim that a properly run offshore is way more secure then bitcoin and you said don't compare Switzerland to Cyprus.  The fact is even in your properly run Switzerland an employee wholesale sold out an entire supposedly private banks client list.  There is no way for him to know which of those clients where tax evaders and which were not.

It won't destroy judgment-enforcement; it may help (further) separate talented creditor-lawyers from hacks.  You'd be surprised at the extensive toolkit a highly-motivated creditor can deploy in many jurisdictions.  The participants to a particular transaction may be invisible to the network, but your transactions aren't invisible when all of your computer equipment is delivered to your opponent's lawyers or your bankruptcy trustee by the sheriff or marshal.  US exchanges/online wallets will not likely be immune from garnishments. 

These are good things, by the way, if you want btc to be treated as meaningful commercial currency.

What good is seizing a computer if the whole drive has been encrypted.  The password?  "Password123".  That doesn't work?  Hmm I must have forgotten it.

The is before we even get to fun stuff like deniable encryption.
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/plausible-deniability

Oh the Gigabytes of random data on the drive? I always write the drive with random data after a format to make recovery impossible. Feel free to try and prove this random sequence of bits is an encrypted partition and not just a random sequence of bits.

Your're right that someone this prepared and smart could make finding and liquidating asset X a challenge, but how many people do you think are that prepared?  What subset of those people would ever be in the situation of not honoring their obligations in the first place such that hiding assets is necessary? 

It's not "getting to the actual coins and being able to liquidate them instantly" that is the only pressure point for a motivated creditor versus an extremely well-prepared debtor.  You might be able to keep USD buried in your yard that a US Marshal wont find on the first 10 trips to your house.  But eventually that money comes out of the ground to pay for stuff, like lawyers.  The creditor's goal is learning enough to justify a suspicion that there is probably wealth somewhere, and applying pressure elsewhere to convince you to cough it up.  Simply "forgetting" the details and records to explain where all your assets went isn't good enough, may land you in jail for perjury, and is enough (by itself) to lose a right to a last-resort bankruptcy discharge, for instance.

None of this stuff is worth worrying about if we're talking about small potatoes debt.  Just don't screw over real large stakes investors and lenders and expect to live happily and wealthily ever after because you think you're long in an invisible asset.