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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

You are absolutely right, but I have two issues with that:

1) Non-criminals also lie on the forms. Mainly because it's sometimes their only way to open a bank account (if they are deemed risky by an AML department), even if they have a legal source of income. This renders people who would otherwise not be criminals into criminals. Just recently, I came across a Tweet[0] from someone who will have to face this dilemma sooner or later.

2) It's a loophole for prosecution, as you admit yourself. It's meant to circumvent well established legal principles. For example, in AML cases, the burden of proof is reversed ("guilty until proven innocent"). It's used as a tool to punish people for crimes when the evidence is not sufficient. Is this really something we want?

[0] https://twitter.com/mikeinspace/status/1708719585556344993

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What you're describing is a tricky situation with trade-offs.

When you face a tricky situation with trade-offs, you have to find a smart and/or complicated solution. It's not usually productive to say "just throw away the solution we have" even if that can be an emotionally satisfying answer.

That thread is about someone determining the cost basis of their crypto and suggesting they go with $0 as they can't reliably ascertain that number. How does that relate to lying on bank forms?

The question was unrelated but they will nevertheless face this issue. Because if it's a decent amount of Bitcoin and they don't have a paper trail, they will get flagged and reported by their bank and/or crypto exchange. And they will possibly go to prison for money laundering as they won't be able to prove the source of their Bitcoin. So they have three choices:

1) Give up on on their legally acquired BTC, potentially worth millions of dollar.

2) Be honest on the form and pray that they don't get flagged.

3) Lie on the form.

There's basically no legal option for cashing out their BTC. A lot of early BTC adopters face this issue, as not everyone had the foresight to keep a paper trail for their 50$ "funny internet money" purchase at Starbucks.

Disclaimer: IANAL and this is not legal advice.

These early adopters are paying for their lack of bookkeeping the same way someone who kept a similar amount of trail-less cash out of the bank would. It's hard to find sympathy for that kind of glibness, especially when crypto actually can be traced back still under most conditions - assuming your bank didn't lose their records from the time, you could show a purchase and vague value increase over time, and accompanying account statements would resolve any AML concerns.

You think it's fair that someone should lose millions of dollars or go to jail because they didn't keep paperwork for a 50$ cash purchase they made a decade ago? In the early days of Bitcoin, a lot of the purchases were made peer-to-peer with cash. There were even websites called faucets that were literally giving it away.

> someone who kept a similar amount of trail-less cash out of the bank

avoiding banks is not a crime.

Be honest on what form? I've moved hundred of thousands of dollars and crypto through exchanges and have never filled out a form regarding the provenance of the funds.

Which country? Your exchange or bank would not be compliant in the US. Money transmitters have a duty to determine the source of funds for large transactions. And they have to report any "suspicious activity" to authorities (FinCEN in the US). By the way, it's not necessarily a literal form, they can ask by phone or email for example. The specific details vary from country to country, like what amount threshold triggers the verification or what constitutes acceptable proof, but it's pretty standard thanks to the FATF[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Action_Task_Force

This was in the US. SARs are filled out by banks, not individuals. I've literally never been asked for any proof from Coinbase for over 300k in transfers.

Coinbase does ask that. You can Google "coinbase source of funds" for confirmation. They even mention it in their user agreement[0].

You got lucky and/or maybe forgot that you supplied that information when you signed up. Sometimes it can just take the form of asking for occupation and income. It's possible that they didn't ask further proof if they determined that your transactions were not unusual given your declared occupation and income.

[0] https://coinbase.com/legal/user_agreement/united_states "Verifying your identity by submitting the following information: [...] Source of Funds"

Fair enough, it is probably not unusual given my occupation. I would mention, though, that if the person in question stood to profit potentially millions of dollars as you mention, they can more than likely afford legal counsel to help them through this, rather than taking to Twitter.

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