No one tells you what compliance really means. They dress it up as civic duty, social contract, fair share. Underneath, it is just a one-way mirror: you see the state, but the state sees through you. They do not just want your capital, they want your digital reflection. They do not just want tax, they want submission, repeated, documented, signed in blood or ledger.

Registering with the IRS, the tax authority, the alphabet-soup overseers? You are gifting them a switch. A lever. Data is pre-crime in the modern era. Today's info is tomorrow's justification for a retroactive penalty, a future fee, an invented offense. Unrealized gains. Exit tax. Where do these end? They do not. They just mutate. The walls grow taller every year, and the barbed wire is your own paperwork.

Stablecoins in cold storage? Maybe it buys you time. Maybe it just delays the knock at the door. KYC everywhere, AML everywhere, a new net every year.