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Comment by yafujifide | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you've gone all-in with the US government, and now you can't criticise it without risking everything.

It is possible to internationalize yourself and your assets in such a way that no one government can threaten you with taking everything away. I suggest taking a look at these internationalization resources:

http://www.internationalman.com/ http://www.sovereignman.com/ http://nomadcapitalist.com/

Once you internationalize yourself, your fear of government will be substantially reduced and you can be free to take a stand.

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Unless you're living off bitcoins there is no such thing as protected offshore savings. They bribe low level workers to leak supposedly secret info and you wind up in jail. Remember the leaked bvi docs? Swiss and Liechtenstein dvds full of depositor info? Almost every country bends over to sign tax treaties with the US. Swiss numbered accounts are meaningless since the war on terrorderp. They (gov thugs) also specialize in blackmail, your finances aren't their only target

I don't think you'll be hiding assets, but putting it in another country so you don't get caught by surprise that something like Argentina's capital controls that happened nearly overnight.

I am living off bitcoins.

How?

Mostly by converting them to dollars when I need.

So... you're actually living off dollars.

You're not making an attempt to understand the conversation, just being pedantic. He said he was keeping his money in bitcoins to make it so that his money was harder to seize. Yes, he is spending dollars, but the savings is in bitcoins.

It's not being pedantic, it's crucial to the problem of Bitcoin. If I'm trying to live outside of government meddling, and yet I'm spending in dollars, then I may as well keep my savings in monopoly money. Why? Because converting to dollars (outside of a guy handing you cash in a shady park) requires a bank account, which in turn requires government involvement--and that's exactly the problem the OP is trying to avoid.

You think keeping Bitcoins prevents the government from seizing your assets? Well if you trade in dollars, then they don't HAVE to seize your Bitcoin assets. They can just stop you from converting to dollars, and effectively achieve the same result. All the Bitcoins in the world are worthless if you trade in dollars and can't convert Bitcoins to dollars. And if you think MtGox is going to stand up for you when the government comes knocking on their door and demands they stop honoring withdraw requests for your account, then you're wrong.

Bitcoins are cool, they're useful today, and they have potential. But until you can buy a sack of flour from the corner store with Bitcoins, they're not an effective way of evading government meddling. They're just a proxy currency for people who don't understand better.

You've now expanded your argument a lot further than original. I'm not a bitcoin hoarder so I won't try to defend that approach. Your original comment said that he was living off dollars, as though they are equivalent, which I don't think they are. You are right that until bitcoins can be spent directly for goods you are limited. Dollars are not the only thing you can trade them for. If you piss off the US government, they have to work very hard to shut down every exchange in every country in the world. I don't think it's a rock solid plan, but it's not just "living off dollars".

They would not just have to stop you from converting to dollars, including face to face with people you trust, but also stop you from converting to any currency or commodity that is readily convertible to dollars with a small enough loss.

That requires a vastly wider reach.

How do you deal with this without a %1-%3 international transaction 'tax' in the form of currency exchange or bank wiring / card processing transfer fees being levied every time you want to transfer money between borders? For example, I can't find anything like Schwab's %0 currency exchange fee debit card in Canada, and I don't have $100k to just have sitting around in a bank account to get HSBC Premier with it's %0 international fees. You also get the significantly more complicated tax returns and accountant fees you will occur? Have you done this yourself?

I'm currently living in the USA too.

Is this really a viable option short of "internationalizing" yourself to a country like Russia, China or Iran? I've seen very little evidence that any of the countries you would normally want to be an American ex-pat in won't bend over for the US government when push comes to shove (especially when it comes to protecting someone who is an American to begin with and not a native citizen), and plenty of evidence that they will.

I'm not sure it's as easy to do as you suggest. Moving large amounts of money internationally is difficult to do depending on the receiving country, and impossible to do without having it tracked. If you fly, you have to declare cash amounts > $10,000 and that puts you at the caprice of customs officials.

One could create shell corporations and try arranging some kind of complex loophole-based scheme, but that's not only difficult, but also traceable in most cases. There's a reason druglords deal in warehouses full of cash--because if the government wants you bad enough, there's no scheme you can arrange to escape, and even moreso with the NSA watching and storing all of your past and future online activity.

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