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Topic: Best non-US exchange for US actors to avoid IRS/Coinbase type risks (Read 1287 times)

newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
I'm a little drunk so I wont check what I typed. I worked in a bank before and I'm a bitcoiner.

Wiring money offshore periodically will only draw scrutiny from Uncle Sam. Assuming you are not doing anything illegal and your contractors wants get paid in Bitcoins, using a foreign exchange/shell company is a terrible idea in both long and short term. You will have a tough time explaining the offshore activities, which is worse than just wiring the money straight to the contractors.

I'd recommend you do the conversion domestically like the previous commentator.

20k/month is a sizable amount but not a large amount so some of the veteran traders will have plenty of stocks available.

Localbitcoin cash trade is a safe bet but your main issue will be withdrawing cash from the bank ( assuming you are not running a cash business ). If you withdraw over 10k, the bank will file CTR, which will automatically notify the IRS. If you try to structure your deposit, the bank will file SAR which is 100x worse than CTR, and FinCEN and IRS can potentially sieze the entire bank account.  Of course you can find creative ways to get around it and if you need a few pointers I can pm you.

Unfortunately, only cash trade can be done annoymously. Everytime you deal with the ACH or any electronic payments you will inevitablly leave a paper trail.

Enough of random chats here's what I would do if I were you.

US
Campbx: accepts postal and western union money orders ( dont purchase more than 3000$ MO in a single day ). the exchange has 1k/a day - 30k/ a month, and higher limit if you want to verify yourself to the exchange
Gemini Instituional Account:  you can set up a domestic LLC or corp trading account and use their ACH deposit options. 10k a day/ 300k a month Limit. Use tax loopholes to write them off as expenses and not investments.

Foreign
Bitfinex: open up bank account with share branches in both US and HK, HSBC or Cathay such are good options. Use in house account transfer instead of wiring money across the boarder to shell company or exchange, which will not really draw any attention. use the HK funds i bitfinex.
Paypal Transfer: this one is good old fashion. just deposit money into paypal and send them across board and withdraw in local banks. and use the funds to buy bitcoins with foreign exchange. 20k is not even noticeble.

There are many ways to get around depends on how black hat you want to go........
hero member
Activity: 1792
Merit: 534
Leading Crypto Sports Betting & Casino Platform
If you are looking for Japan based exchanges, Bitflyer is the biggest.  That'll let you buy up to 250,000 yen worth of Bitcoin (at time of writing about $2,250) each month with only a phone number or Facebook account.  After verification you can buy more.

If you really want to be safe with your Bitcoin though, I would try LocalBitcoins.  It's anonymous and lets you do cash transfers, so you could buy large amounts of money from a trusted seller.  Unfortunately some people sell LocalBitcoin accounts with high trust sometimes, so the best thing to do is choose more than one account each quarter and exchange with cash since it's not reversible, which would make you anonymous and mean that you're not dealing with an exchange.
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
Dear intelligent people,

We need to start buying $20K+ of bitcoin at least quarterly and soon likely monthly to pay pseudonymous developers that we are using as contractor/consultants for our projects.

If we had been using Coinbase in the US, which fortunately we narrowly avoided starting to, we would be exposed to the unknown risks of the irrational and violent US federal government. For example potentially in the future, when the IRS has the full Coinbase user data, it can try to extract capital gains taxes from anyone who has bought coins on Coinbase, unless you can prove you sold them or spent them, and then they would likely want to mark each transaction to the dollar value at the time and still demand past due taxes. The US government commits random acts of financial violence perhaps daily selecting from hit lists acquired through various "inquires" and seizes assets which can take extensive effort to recover for even the most innocent of victims. Potentially in the near future involvement in transactions in a currency that can undermine the faith and confidence of the nation's currency would be considered far from innocent by the society and politicians.

In the short term - does anybody have good reasons to recommend a non-US exchange that a US person or LLC could wire USD to overseas to using SWIFT from standard US bank, purchase bitcoins on the exchange, withdraw them and then would be least likely to have it's records seized from the exchange by the IRS ala Coinbase style, and also least likely to raise red flags within the US banking system for the SWIFT wires? Currently I'm thinking Japan or HK based probably. Related to this, any thoughts on US banks that are least likely to be aggressively flagging wire transactions to authorities.

After we acquire our bitcoins we always tumble our coins prior to spending them, so that in the future neither the pseudonymous contractors or the source of the coins can easily link the transactions directly to us. A longer term idea is to create an offshore legal entity somewhere that we will use as an "umbrella" entity for paying our bitcoin contractors / employees. It will be a "technology consulting and services" company, which is exactly what it is actually. We can then wire this entity USD and associate an invoice issued by the non-US entity to the US entity for service rendered. The SWIFT wire from the US entity will be into a non-US offshore account held by the offshore consulting company. The offshore legal entity can then wire the USD to an appropriate exchange to purchase bitcoin.

For this long term approach - does anybody have any thoughts or recommendations on the best jurisdiction for attempting to build this non-US entity. Ideally we would like to be able to use US persons and therefore US passports, but if this is too difficult we potentially can rely on some individuals with non-US citizenship. Which nations / jurisdictions do people think are most resilient to aggressive pressure to force disclosures to the US authorities. Obviously Switzerland was unable to resist the pressure on this topic in regards to the traditional financial system.

Thank you for any information or suggestions.

Regards,
Null Pointer
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