Article Image

IPFS News Link • Bitcoin

Bitcoin Wins in Court

• https://fee.org, Larry White

It is a small setback for authorities who want to fight crime (victimless or otherwise) by criminalizing and tracking the "laundering" of the proceeds, and who unreasonably want to do the tracking by eliminating citizens' financial privacy, that is, by unrestricted tracking of their subjects' financial accounts and activities. The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is today the headquarters of such efforts.

As an Atlanta Fed primer reminds us, the authorities' efforts are built upon the Banking Secrecy Act (BSA) of 1970. (A franker label would be the Banking Anti-Secrecy Act). The Act has been supplemented and amended many times by Congress, particularly by Title III of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, and expanded by diktats of the Federal Reserve and FinCEN.