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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

>detailing a strategy to interdict and detect [...] digital currencies [...] at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States;

Uh what? They want to detect the presence of crypto currency at the border? How would that even work? Something tells me none of the sponsors for this bill know any specifics for how bitcoin et al. work.

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My assumption would be if they were to see someone with a foreign address come and try to cash out 1000 BTC in USD (or even 10BTC currently) on one of the exchanges, then they would want to know where those bitcoins came from. It would be able to combat another form of layering (with the normal process of placement, layering, and integration). So "at border crossings" here would probably mean any bitcoin exchange operating in the US that deals with foreign entities.

That would be a strange way to word it, wouldn't it? More likely they want to scan your device and use it against you if you are "carrying" undeclared "currency".

You don't "carry" crypto currency though, you hold the private key to an address. I don't see how they could determine some random binary blob on your laptop/flash drive/etc. is in fact a private key that is responsible for a number of coins. What if I used an Electrum wallet and just kept the master seed saved, then it's just a string of random words. I could just as easily memorize that or physically write it down somewhere instead.

I think that's why they have a part about determining if technology can be invented to detect this. And a lot of these laws seem to have a point of making easy things illegal, so they have more ways to go after you if they need to.

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