US Travelers With Cryptocurrency Under Attack by Lawmakers

I recently came across this article from Free Thought Project that details pending US legislation that would make it illegal to "travel" with cryptocurrency valuing in excess of $10,000. The bill in the Senate is SB1241 for those interested. Here's a link to their original article.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/sb-bill-federal-assets-cash-seized/

I’m no lawyer, but I would hope this legislation would be pretty easy to shoot down in the courts should it be voted into law. Cryptocurrency has such an ethereal quality to it (thus one name, Ethereum) that you couldn't be said to "carry" it anywhere. It's not a physical asset, and unless you access said funds (by “spending” them) while travelling internationally, you can't be said to have taken them across the border, right? And so it follows that once you're inside the US, good luck to the Feds trying to prove whether you access those funds and prosecuting without having had probable cause during their investigation. Now this won't stop them from seizing your assets during their wild goose chase mind you, but I’m hoping the law won’t withstand even one court case before it is ruled unconstitutional. Civil asset forfeiture, that's a whole other ball of wax that they've gotten around by calling the seizures civil actions and therefore not covered by constitutional protections, but I digress.

I’m just sort of wondering out loud here (or in print as it were, if any lawyers read this, please correct me if I'm wrong), but this is not to mention that I think there may be a legal precedent for cryptocurrency that would throw a wrench into lawmakers' plans on this one, and it's because Bitcoin isn't considered to be money. In a Florida money laundering case against a man named Espinosa (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/07/26/florida_judge_rules_that_bitcoin_isn_t_money.html), the judge ruled that Bitcoin isn't money, setting that legal precedent (as far as my amateur understanding goes). This leads me to believe that other cryptocurrencies fit under this umbrella as well. It seems like you can't have both: a. Bitcoin not be money and b. Treat Bitcoin as if it were money in a law and expect it to be upheld in the courts. Who knows though, a lot about our legal system doesn't make any sense to me, so maybe they can do that.

Traveling?

Revisiting what I said above, unless you convert or spend the Bitcoin, you can't be said to have carried the asset anywhere, can you? Just because you happen to own more than $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, unless you convert more than that amount while traveling internationally, into some other asset like dollars or gold, you can't be said to have carried the entire amount of the asset with you, just the portion that you’ve converted into another asset. Bitcoin exists everywhere on the planet and nowhere at the same time, so it's impossible to put a place on it unless you follow the person who controls it. You may have noticed I said used the word controls instead of owns, because you can't really take physical possession of it. If the person who controls this ethereal asset only accesses a small portion of it while traveling, only that amount moved with the person. And that’s if they can legally show it’s even possible to carry or move Bitcoin in the first place.

Another issue with all of this is that if you happened to access the money once you were across an international border, can it really be said that you carried it across a border? Did you access it in the moments of your crossing? The answer is no, and if not, it would seem that you simply accessed it once in one country and another time in a second country, but it theoretically existed simultaneously in both while you were in the process of traveling from one to the other. You didn't move anything, because you can't move something that doesn't physically exist in a place. It's not even stored on a physical machine (at least not one machine anyway).

The linguistic hoops a lawmaker would have to jump through to make this kind of thing pass logical muster kind of boggles the mind. This is not to mention how difficult it might be to police such activity due to the nature of cryptos. It’s interesting stuff to think about. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Image Source: Pixabay User HypnoArt at https://pixabay.com/en/bitcoin-economy-currency-finance-1995332/