Key Disclosure Laws Can Be Used To Confiscate Bitcoin Assets

Jon Matonis explains how the government could use Key Disclosure laws to seize bitcoins:

(Full article)

Key disclosure laws may become the most important government tool in asset seizures and the war on money laundering. When charged with a criminal offense, that refers to the ability of the government to demand that you surrender your private encryption keys that decrypt your data. If your data is currency such as access control to various amounts of bitcoin on the block chain, then you have surrendered your financial transaction history and potentially the value itself.

These laws will impact not only money laundering prosecution but almost any asset protection strategy that attempts to maintain an element of financial privacy such as private banking or family trusts. Prior to all these money laundering laws being enacted, I once heard it said that the practice of moving money around was simply referred to as banking.

Doug Casey famously said that "it's a completely artificial crime. It wasn't even heard of 20 years ago, because the 'crime' didn't exist." Furthermore he said, "The War on Drugs may be where 'money laundering' originated as a crime, but today it has a lot more to do with something infinitely more important to the state: the War on Tax Evasion." And, if they can't track it from the outside via the banks and financial institutions, they'll track it from the inside via access to an individual's passwords and private keys.

...

Many observers have suggested defensive techniques that deploy TrueCrypt disk encryption with hidden volume partitions or PGP Whole Disk Encryption rendering the entire computer unbootable thereby making even file time and date stamps unavailable. Another legal strategy to complicate matters could be to split the passphrase with another person and claim that you are never in possession of the entire real passphrase. Then, at least there would be "plausible deniability" as to who provided the invalid portion of the passphrase or you would have a cellmate if held in contempt.