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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

I was listening to the Tim Ferris / Balaji Srinivasan podcast the other day and Balaji suspects the US government will use civil asset forfeiture to steal bitcoin as it becomes more valuable in the future.

Considering most people that own bitcoin use custodial services like Coinbase, and Coinbase uses safety deposit boxes to store their code wallets + keys, am I wrong in thinking the US government has the ability to identify all of the safety deposit boxes Coinbase uses and steal those keys?

good podcast, actual reference starts here:

https://youtu.be/FV5SqIm5e90?t=6239

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Bitcoin and it's ilk are the perfect tool for government control. At first I was on board (be my own bank? sure, they're corrupt) but then someone pointed out that the Fed will simply use the technology built by these people to create a fed-coin and we will all be forced to use it. I hope I'm wrong, sounds like a nightmare. Can't even give cash for a birthday present without being taxed...

The gift tax exclusion is $16k per year, per gifter, per recipient, plus another 12 million dollars of lifetime exclusion.

Tracking would not change that.

Are you giving cash gifts of more than $16k as birthday presents?

> * Can't even give cash for a birthday present without being taxed...*

Man, if you're worried about gift tax for birthday presents, I wish I was related to you and was a recipient. Quite a lot of money needs to change hands for those gifts to be taxable.

You don't even have to go as far as the government making a competitor. Lacking the key ecash property of untraceability, Bitcoin's ledger is completely open to usurpation. Imagine a government-run fork of existing Bitcoin, that can decide whether a given transaction is allowed based on flow/wallet metadata (etc). The govt then mandates that public exchanges need to abide by this, and it's illegal for them to facilitate buy/sell transactions that aren't approved. Then the requirements for getting a transaction approved slowly ramp up, culminating in standard KYC surveillance.

Why would the government want to use tech for a distributed ledger? From their perspective, a centralized ledger that runs on the servers owned by the govt is the ideal state of affairs, and it's technically much simpler than any blockchain.

I've been a proponent of it for awhile now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

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