Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

It's a spreadng practice.

Australia is introducing (or may have already passed?) a similar Act with an AU $10K limit on "unapproved" cash transactions.

Over the limit you'll need approval.

Of course the usual loophole for the weathy applies, 3x $3,000 face value gold bullion coins [1] is under the cash transaction limit, although at a kilo each and ~$88K per in valuae, that's almost $300K in value technically under any travel or transaction declaration "$10K face value" limits . . .

[1] https://www.perthmint.com/shop/bullion/bullion-coins/austral...

View on HN

I couldn't find the face value of those coins?

If I understand correctly you're saying: there is a coin that I can buy for $100,000 (because of its weight in gold) yet it is stamped with $1, which is its face value.

As such it only counts as $1, and this thus is not reportable?

face value is 3000 Australian Dollars.

Which is still 3% of its actual value if melted down.

Anyone can use that loophole it requires no special legal machinations.

Anyone that has 300K$ laying around in gold is most likely very wealthy.

Or acquired the coins specifically for using this loophole

I mean, if the thing you are trying to work around is a law preventing you from paying 300K in cash, I don't think using bullion changes much about how wealthy you are.

What if you're trying to work around a law preventing you from paying €10,001, like the law being discussed?

Then you wouldn't be using three coins valued at $88K each as is being discussed: even using just one, how would you get your change?

That reminds me of the old argument that laws prohibiting same sex marriage or prohibiting engaging in homosexual sex do not discriminate against gay people since they prohibit both gay and straight people from marrying someone of the same sex or engaging in homosexual sex.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

― Anatole France

Wouldn't you need to use that $3000 coin to pay $3000, ie use it for its face value, for this loophole to 'work'? In which case it would not be very useful...

If you use it to pay $88k then the transaction is obviously $88k although you've then paid in gold, not cash.

I feel that this is a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.

It allows you to acquire coins over time, then use them later to move wealth in a less-traceable way.

You could just do same thing with normal money tho ?

Just hypothesizing, do not actually know if this is the mechanism, but it is entirely possible that by storing gold with a broker could allow them to access the value in order to make other investments. Essentially, having cash as collateral means having it in a bank and subject to these restrictions whereas gold in a 3rd party vault might not be but still give you the same access to credit.

So you mean buying gold and using gold? That has nothing to do with the 'loophole' previously described.

Every time the Australian government does something authoritarian I double my Monero holdings (I'm about to have to give that strategy up :[, unfortunately). If the government starts spinning out of control to the point where people actually need to start dodging these invasive financial laws, those gold coins are going to get seized.

Like in 1933.

http://goldtheft.com/

France requires that you declare all funds or “digital accounts” (assets, not only currencies) owned overseas, and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight, like they did in Cyrpus. The world behaves as if countries were going to seize all privately-owned assets and make you live on salary.

Well it’s not that. Everything is seized because the money in your bank isn’t technically yours. This is the same wherever in the world. However, there exists a public fund that guarantees that, in case of a bankruptcy of your bank, you’ll be compensated by this fund up to 100k€.

So it’s technically impossible to lose anything if you don’t have more than 100k€ in a checking account. Which, even if you were rich, would be a rather stupid move because you don’t earn any interest on this. If your patrimony is superior to 100k€, you probably own financial assets rather than money in your checking accounts. And since you own your financial assets and your bank is only doing the management for you, they can’t be seized because they aren’t owned by the bank.

So it’s blatantly false to say that you can be seized of anything above 100k€. You’ve got to manage your money really badly to be bitten by this.

This is a whole new level of confusion...

" and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight" please give a source or at least detail the conditions it can be applied. The way you phrase it sounds like it can be completely arbitrary

If you choose to abide by the letter but not the spirit of the law, you take a big risk. Why would you do that? Especially if you are that rich?

Is the goal to push people to crypto?

> The new EU anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules will be extended to the entire crypto sector, obliging all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to conduct due diligence on their customers. This means that they will have to verify facts and information about their customers.

Thanks for the information and taking my bad question seriously.

Note: $10,000 AUD is ~€6,500

3x $3000 in cash is also under the limit.

In the US, I think multiple transactions of $9K to avoid a $10K reporting threshold would be illegal:

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

Yes it’s called ‘structuring’ or smirking and is variously restricted in many places since it’s an obvious on-ramp to money laundering and tax evasion.

The point is that the face value of the coins counts for the limit, not the value when you sell those coins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com