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May 16, 2013, 03:43:44 AM |
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As davidspitzer has already said, you`ve got to have an illegal act, or rather an agreement by more than one individual to commit an illegal act.
So if you do hatch a plan to launder money or evade taxes using bitcoin, and you discuss this with others, who in some way agree to assist you in your laundering or your tax evasion, then you could be charged with conspiracy. The fact of using bitcoin itself in no way leads to such a charge, however. There would need to be some evidence that you actively planned to use it for some illegal purpose.
The simple comparison is to cash - if you are given $5,000 in cash in a brown paper bag on a corner late at night, that looks suspicious. But it could be for a used car or any number of other things. It could also be part of a sophisticated money-laundering plot, but without some kind of evidence to suggest and support that, a charge to that effect is going nowhere.
It is true that no steps need to have been put into place - this separates conspiracy from attempt in most framework. Conspiracy is the plan and includes more than one person - attempt is starting to actually DO something, and the measure is whether or not something "more than merely preparatory" to the illegal act has been undertaken. How that is interpreted varies from place to place, but examples include: Walking up to a post office holding a gun but being arrested by police before entering - these steps were "merely preparatory", whereas had the arrest taken place once *inside* the post office, the charge might have stuck.
With conspiracy, you don't have that hurdle, but you need to prove that the defendant conspired with others to commit whatever the illegal act is.
For bitcoin, you're looking at money laundering and tax evasion primarily. Debasement of some other currency is a little bit much - even if that was your ultimate goal, you aren't in a position to substantially debase it unless you have real, unsupervised access to the Federal Reserve / Central Bank printing presses. Undermining a currency (even assuming that you have clearly communicated that this is your goal) is not in and of itself a crime.
In any case, if you want to accept peanut shells, Campbell's soup labels, or bubblegum as payment there's nothing that stops you from doing so. National fiat currencies are propped up by the obligation to pay taxes with them, which means that even if you switch to bubblegum, you need to declare your capital gains (if you buy bubblegum at $1 per gumball and sell at $5) or declare a barter tax when you trade 1 gumball for $5 worth of fresh duck eggs.
So, using / holding / accepting bitcoin is nowhere near adequate for any kind of conspiracy charge. Using it, amassing a sizable fortune in it, and crowing about your intention to overthrow the state or avoid paying taxes on it potentially would be, depending on how readily those statements could be retrieved and how convincingly they could be attributed to you.
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