SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the all-your-coin-are-belong-to-us dept.
In May, the bill S.1241 (archive) was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa. The bill, if enacted, would call upon the Department of Homeland Security to develop
a strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States
According to a story at btcmanager.com (square brackets in original),
the bill would "criminalize [those] intentionally concealing ownership or control of a [digital currency or digital exchange] account.
The Senate held a meeting about the bill on November 28. Witnesses included Charles Davidson of the Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute conservative think tank; Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants, which specializes in "issues of national security, transnational crime, terrorism, terror finance and non-state armed actors"; and Kathryn Haun Rodriguez of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange. Ms. Haun, however, made no mention of cryptocurrency in her testimony (PDF).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:09PM
Sure, but that storage device doesn't need to be on your person.
For example you could store your wallet on Dropbox, or any other file storage service anywhere in the world. In a file encrypted using some nondescript photo on your phone as a keyfile, if you want to be properly paranoid but still have convenient access.
This stuff is completely ridiculous. Every Senator born in the 1930s knows full well that the only way to move money across borders is in person, and that this law will work just fine in physically preventing people from moving money across borders without authorization.