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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

Another reason why people like Bitcoin, it's easily portable

I guess if you're a billionaire it's more convenient. I just did a little googling and a 1 oz gold coin appears to be pretty small and is worth something like ~$2300 today. That seems portable enough in my eyes, although I can't see that being super useful for everyday transactions.

Edit: I guess you're probably talking about entering another country's border. I guess portability makes more sense there in that you don't have anything physical.

I know that hacker news frequently dislikes Blockchain but this comment is accurate and relevant and there’s no reason to downvote it.

How is it accurate? If you have $10M worth of gold in country A and want to get it into country B without paying the 10% import tax, how does Bitcoin help?

- Sell $10M gold for the sum of $10M - Buy $10M worth of Bitcoin - Transfer $10M worth of Bitcoin to country B, or just travel to country B - Convert $10M worth of Bitcoin to local currency

That said, you'd have to do all the conversion of BTC to fiat through shady channels, as by now all of the legal / above ground exchanges report every transfer to the local and international tax offices. Second, any conversion will charge a percentage.

In theory, BTC travels freely across borders without import taxes. In practice, it's useless if not converted to fiat, and all conversions are logged and taxed.

"This crime would've been way easier to get away with using Bitcoin" isn't the huge positive endorsement the parent poster implies.

Transporting value across borders is what Bitcoin routinely does, and quite well too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520886

And if you want to force Afghan refugees (for example) to return and pay their taxes to the Taliban, then I don't know how to respond to that.

Bitcoin gives people freedom, as you can read more about here: https://hrf.org/hrf-op-ed-why-central-bank-digital-currencie...

Cool. When you enter Japan with $10M in gold, their democratically elected government has opted to charge an import tax. That is one of their freedoms as a sovereign nation.

edit: Post above originally said "One country's crime is another country's freedom" instead.

This incident almost certainly revolves around capital controls in China, with the Japanese infraction only being collateral damage justified by the China problem.

Are you of the opinion that, upon arrival in Japan, the smugglers would've disclosed the gold and gone "phew, here's your $1M we owe in tax"?

> And if you want to force Afghan refugees (for example) to return and pay their taxes to the Taliban, then I don't know how to respond to that.

This is such an absurd straw man.

Yeah but just try making machine parts out of it and see how far you get.

Wait, bitcoins aren't those gold coins with a B on them?

I really should look more into this Bitcoins money thing...

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