Eric Hughes writes:
If A writes a check to 'cash', pays B with it, and B passes it on to C, and so forth, are you saying that this is or will one day be illegal?
An individual note and its transfers are unlikely to be made illegal. But that's not the whole story. A company engaged in the business of issuing such notes and not recording (perhaps, a fortiori, by not being able to record) the transactions among people for these instruments, however, could be ruled to be performing a separate activity which could then be made illegal.
Just because a single act is legal doesn't mean that a bunch of the same acts are. For example, not reporting a $5000 cash transfer is legal, but not reporting half a dozen of them made to the same person in the same day almost certainly is.
The IRS/Treasury/etc. has the term "structuring" to refer to attempts to circumvent the reporting laws by doing "individually legal" transactions which are "collectively illegal." For example, getting around the $10,000 limit (which may have been lowered, I hear) by doing multiple $9,000 transactions. FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) is a multi-agency body that looks for things like this. Consistent with earlier points about the government not wanting to make it completely clear what's legal and what's illegal (regulatory discretion), the laws about structuring are not clear. Suspicion of structuring seems to be enough for a costly investigation and possible prosecution. It'll be interesting to see how crypto transactions are treated. The possibilities for structuring are exciting to we Cypherpunks, which means the Feds may act quickly to declare such transactions illegal. (Connections to key escrow/GAK, illegality of digital cash, legal hacking, and the huge new NRO complex near the credit card companies is left as an exercise.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."