Surviving a Government Seizure: A True, Personal Story
Bitcoin maxis are mocked for being paranoid. Why would you be your own bank? The government wouldn't *actually* seize your assets, right? Yes, I've been burned twice for trying to bank differently.
Now that I’m working in web3, people are always curious about origin stories. When did you first hear about Bitcoin? Ya, but when did you actually get it?
I’ve shared this story on another blog, but the simplified version goes as follows.
Being a silver and gold bug since the mid 1990s (thanks to my amazing uncle), I was pissed knowing that our currency lost its backing. So a decade later when the Liberty Dollar came out, I went all in on it. And by all in, I mean as much money as a college student could save up (approximately $10,000).
The government was not happy about this company, but NORFED was very open and directly communicated with the US Treasury on a routine basis. If they were out of bounds, they tried desparately to get into an engaged debate.
Instead, the government used force. One day, they raided the Sunshine Mint, and confiscated all assets related to NORFED and The Liberty Dollar. It took almost a decade for the courts to later release the assets back to users/owners like myself.
So you can imagine having lived through such an experience, that having the ability to keep some money in a format that can’t be raided and seized by any government is quite attractive.
And this is the US, where courts eventually ruled in favor of me to give the assets back. I imagine there are many jurisdictions where a citizen would have an almost 0% chance of getting their money back. This is why decentralized currencies matter.