If you store your coins on a hard drive there's nothing the government can do to get them right? They would need your private key and your hard drive?
There is something called the "gun test". The crypto on an encrypted hard drive is not more secure than the gold bars in a locked safe. Its security is a function of how the secret holder response to gun-on-their-head events. In this case, since the government is directly involved (and angry), a lot of criminals may pick personal safety over assets.
Frankly, I think a large portion of cryptocurrency proponents are overly confident in its "decentralization" and "safety". Cryptocurrency is only as safe as gold bars in a locked safe; and worse if you use a public exchange.
In cryptography, rubber-hose cryptanalysis is a euphemism for the extraction of cryptographic secrets (e.g. the password to an encrypted file) from a person by coercion or torture[1]—such as beating that person with a rubber hose, hence the name—in contrast to a mathematical or technical cryptanalytic attack.
If you're tortured to keep revealing keys to deeper and deeper volumes, eventually you're going to hit a point where there are no more volumes, but you can't prove it.
I think the original threat model was someone willing to torture you, but willing to accept plausible deniability once you'd revealed some moderately sensitive information.
In reality, if someone is willing to torture you a couple volumes deep, there's a good chance they're going to just keep torturing you forever. Rubberhose may still work in this model, since in theory the promise of avoiding torture loses most of its power. The downside is that once you format a partition with Rubberhose, you're resigning yourself to being tortured forever.
All the cryptographic, air gapped security hardware doesn’t matter if someone can beat the keys out of you.
That's usually the problem that people who pay a lot of taxes have with the taxes.
It's very hard to do this with gold.
B. To bury gold you must transport the valuable property in meat space to your hiding spot after acquiring it. With cryptocurrency, you hide the secrets before they have value and transfer the funds to them without new data actually traveling to the hiding spot, electronically or physically.
My read is that tax enforcement failure is intentional, lubricated by political donations and influence, vs incompetence.
See the high-net-worth enforcement group at the IRS that was quickly shut down for murky reasons.
Most people serious about cryptocurrencies do not trust computers/harddrives anymore since years. They use "hardware wallets", which are HSMs with a very small attack surface. It's not impossible that hacks happen but there's a gap so wide between "a Windows 10 computer running some Bitcoin software wallet" and "a Ledger Nano S" hardware wallet that it's basically two different worlds.
Think a Yubikey (with a tiny screen) to cryptographically sign your transaction.
$5 wrench attack still works but compromising your private key(s) by "logging every OS keystroke in the name of telemetry" or "using one of the tens JavaScript 0-day from today" doesn't.
The idea behind these cryptocurrencies hardware wallets is that ANY computer you connect them to is compromised (which is precisely why you're using an hardware wallet) and that, yet, that's not a problem.
I have to say: it's not a bad way to think about computer (in)security.
If that's not enough and anyone of them is in the USA they do have access
Can your wallet be hard to crack? Yes but either use your zero day to get all data including a Password or book a little bit of supercomputer time for brute forcing.
They might have linguists available to help out with a dictionary attack.
As aluminum foil hat this might have sound in pre Snowden that's how it could have been played out.
What you store is your private key.
Your private key was generated together with your public key, and your public key is, well, public.
So the question is, can someone re-generate your private key?
In theory, yes, it is possible. In practice, it takes a very very long time.
But sometimes flaws are found in the generation process, like a weak pseudo-random number generated used, which significantly reduces the solution space, and then it becomes feasible.
With state actors, you have to assume they have access/backdoors to most modern computing devices, and that device has to connect to the internet only twice - feds activate the backdoor and give it instructions, and have the device send the requested info back to the fed.
Minix being the most popular operating system, thanks to Intel-backdoor-on-a-chip, is only the tip of the iceberg.