The bankrupt US government has been instituting capital controls for years now and have ensured that Americans can’t open a bank account nor even a bitcoin exchange account outside of the US through things like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and just outright threatening to attack any bank or bitcoin exchange in the world who accepts Americans as clients.
This leaves Americans in the “land of the free” with very few options for bitcoin exchanges.
No exchange outside of the US will accept Americans as clients. They’ll accept North Koreans. Iranians. Russians. Chinese. Anyone… except for Americans.
And due to all the regulations in the fascist/socialist mixed US economy, it is incredibly hard to even operate a bitcoin exchange in the US.
While there are now a few other options, which we’ll discuss further below, until recently, there was only one option. Coinbase.
To be fair to Coinbase a lot of the issues with the exchange aren’t its fault directly. They are due to the myriad of rules and regulations that are strictly enforced in the US police state.
This has led to countless complaints about how difficult it is to open an account at Coinbase. Many have said that it is just as difficult to open an account at Coinbase as it is to open a bank account in the US… which usually requires a phone book stack of documents and needing to report in each morning with what you ate for breakfast.
And there have been countless reports of people saying that Coinbase closed their account without reason or notice. And many others have reported that their bank accounts have been closed once the bank noticed they were doing business with Coinbase.
Matters were made worse when late last year the IRS requested a John Doe summons as part of a bitcoin extortion-evasion probe, seeking to identify all Coinbase users in the US who “conducted transactions in a convertible virtual currency.”
After all, the thieves at the IRS expect to get their cut.
To add to that, the US federal government is pushing a bill called “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017” – which we talked about a few days ago.
This bill takes a further step to target bitcoin and wants to put any business which “issues” cryptocurrency under this umbrella of anti-money laundering regulations. Also, it will include bitcoin on the list of monetary instruments that must be reported when entering or leaving the US.
Full story at The Dollar Vigilante
