Is Bitcoin and Gold Safe from the Coming Safe Deposit Box Seizures?

One the most important decisions an investor in cryptocurrencies and gold must make is how and where to store it safely. For over 150 years, the bank safety deposit box was a go-to choice for many to safeguard their valuables.  As the space limitations, regulations, and government overreach have chipped away at the “safety” of the safety deposit box, investors today require better options.

Although cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin hold value in a digital format, storage and safekeeping are more important than most think.  The cryptographic keys (a set of numbers that are impossible to guess) that hold your Bitcoins must be held and stored appropriately to prevent theft or from being lost. The person who knows those cryptographic keys owns the Bitcoins.  So for big investors in cryptocurrencies, keeping these keys safe and secure is paramount.

Physical gold presents other obstacles. Storing them in a safe in one’s home makes it susceptible to seizures and theft. Trying to store gold in a bank safety deposit box (against the bank’s terms and conditions that state you cannot) makes it susceptible to seizures and government overreach.

Not too long ago we learned about the “Ex Parte” seizure of bank account assets that banks are already doing at the encouragement of their respective national governments in Europe and around the world. This means that without providing you with any advance warning, they basically engage in a Cyprus-styled bail-in of the failing banking system by seizing all account assets over a set amount, in that case over 100,000 euros per account.

Today we look at the next logical step in the progression of government-induced banking theft. This is the war on safety deposit boxes. Today’s safety deposit boxes located in banks are anything but safe. Several European Union nations have made bold moves into this frontier already.

As usual, what is good enough for the E.U. is good enough for the U.S. In April of 2015, Chase Bank warned its clients renting safe deposit boxes that the bank would no longer find it acceptable to store “cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value” within their boxes in the bank vault. This was an ominous warning. It is a harbinger of the things to come in the United States soon.

This time, it is another Greek-speaking nation that leads the way toward safe deposit box confiscation with a dry run trial— the Republic of Greece. They pioneered the mass confiscation of contents in safe deposit boxes and wealth and securities hidden in private citizens’ homes. This starts as usual with so-called confiscation legislation. The ostensible legitimate reason for implementing it is that tax evasion in Greece is rampant.

This might comfort you with the notion that only those who have cheated on the tax system will run the risk of losing their private wealth. Yet the Greek government is the organization with sole discretion over who will have their safe deposit box assets seized. It will come down to whether or not the individuals can sufficiently explain where the valuables came from and with what resources they were initially acquired.

The Greek Parliament is taking this legislation to a whole new level. They passed regulations that “permit the mass confiscation of safe deposit box contents and financial assets such as securities,” per a Zero Hedge report.

You could easily pass this off as unimportant since it happened in little Greece, an economically drowning nation of only 10 million individuals. Yet keep in mind that the whole Cyprus affair that captured the world’s attention with its bank account confiscation occurred in an E.U. country boasting an entire one million people.

Remember it is not only Europe that is up to its proverbial eyeballs in debt. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, both Canada and especially the United States possess far higher levels of national debt which they can never hope to repay. This is why Greece is the trial balloon for both North American nations in serious debt.

Is your portfolio protected by adequately secured, stored, and insured cryptocurrencies or gold?

When your country’s government opts to seize your valuables in safe deposit boxes throughout the nation, you can rest assured that there will be no advance warning on confiscation laws.  We know this with confidence since the other measures for confiscation in Greece and the European Union came completely by surprise.

With the advent of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, many of those seizures will also likely lead to many compromised cryptographic keys giving the governments access to possibly billions in Bitcoin.

The way to safeguard your wealth is with a portion of it allocated to cryptocurrencies and gold that you store quietly in a secured and insured vault in an offshore jurisdiction like Dubai, Singapore, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, or Hong Kong.  Alternatively, if you live in the United States or Canada you can secure some in your  Bitcoin IRA/RRSP or Gold IRA/RRSP retirement account with the same security and insurance options.

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