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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

It does have (very very narrow) legitimate purpose, which is problematic abandoned property. Like say your age-of-sail ship has illegal stuff discovered by the customs inspectors, and everyone you can track down insists it isn't theirs.

But that ends the moment someone says it's theirs, or there are records pointing to an owner who isn't actively hiding from you. This whole modern "prove where you got it from" bs is just theft.

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You can have a different law for that: "abandoned property". Essentially, you get the property just by showing up and not suing for it.

CF forfeiture laws are in theory supposed to be used against contraband and related materials. Nobody* is going to claim a suitcase with 3 bricks of cocaine and $500k whose owner the police are very anxious to locate.

* Nobody with a clue. Petty criminals do sometimes turn up at police stations looking for lost property of this kind and are then surprised to be arrested.

The law around freshly abandoned property, as declared by the police, would be nearly indistinguishable from reformed civil forfeiture.

It is indeed. I know there are not as many who lived through the great depression now, but really cannot blame those who don't trust the banks. Also feel like we get taxed way more than we should be with many things getting taxed multiple times... Going to stop before going full rant. Innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around...

People who don't trust banks don't understand fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and inflationary monetary policy.

Banks can crash faster than you can adapt. It can be extremely hard to physically get to your savings money in a crisis.

A bank failure + deposit insurance bust is a tail risk.

Inflation is a constant.

(And to pre-add, precious metals haven't historically been a great hedge either, when benchmarked against investing in economic growth)

> can be extremely hard to physically get to your savings money in a crisis

Having spare cash around is never a bad idea. But there are precious few timelines in which the banking system collapses so completely that savings are inaccessible for extended periods (or at all) but paper U.S. dollars continue to hold value.

No one expects it to hold 100% of value, but even 10% of say $50k could be very helpful to live through the few months of the turmoil. Or to get to that foreign real estate which people recommend buying in comments on HN.

> even 10% of say $50k could be very helpful to live through the few months of the turmoil. Or to get to that foreign real estate

Genuinely curious for a single example of a collapsing country's fiat currency being useful for extradition.

If this is actually your fail case, hold foreign currency.

Well it's one of the tail cases, so all things considered both local currency and foreign currencies are useful, each in it's own quality. So is a foreign currency in a foreign bank.

> it's one of the tail cases, so all things considered both local currency and foreign currencies are useful, each in it's own quality

Not really. If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank. Not in the very short term. But over a timeline of more than a week.

Storing tens of thousands of dollars of cash for an emergency is stupid, because almost every emergency that takes out the banking system renders that currency worthless. You’re better off having hard supplies or forex you can trade for exfiltration.

> If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank.

This is a strong assumption. So far I've experienced three cases of loosing access to my money in the bank for various reasons and I also witnessed one more case with my parents 25 years ago. In all four cases the cash was still useful, losing between 0% and 70% of the value.

None of that was in US of course, but I still think that your range of scenarios is too narrow.

if FDIC is going down you have way worse problems than mere access to cash

"Mere access to cash" means access to food, which is one of the worst problems you can ever get.

with FDIC gone? unlikely, in such a case the dollar will probably have lost value as a means of exchange, if only temporarily

If you want to prevent your cash from getting eaten by inflation, park it in an index fund, T-notes, etc.

If you want to have a reserve for a case when things go badly wrong, banks all go under, government can't bail them out, etc, then park some of your cash in yuan and rupee, in a piece of overseas realty, in gold bullion, and don't forget to invest in medical supplies, shells, and other such gear.

Different views of the future risks drive different decisions.

We understand, we also understand that all these mechanisms fail every once in a while.

> Also feel like we get taxed way more than we should be with many things getting taxed multiple times...

Getting taxed multiple times isn't necessarily bad, it's the overall burden (and deadweight loss!) that matters.

In any case, you could try moving to a lower tax jurisdiction? (And giving up your American passport, if you have any.)

Giving up citizenship is also a taxable event

Yes, but it's a one-time thing, isn't it?

Nope. It only invites corruption.

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