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.
Amen.
The essence of the problem is that governments are going to extremes to figure out exactly what you own that has value, so they can take it from you with taxation.
Real estate --> can't move, easy to value and to tax. Property tax, municipal tax, exit tax, cadastral income tax. Pass on property to your children? Inheritance tax, on property that was already taxed your whole life.
Salary in your bank account --> direct oversight by banks, automated taxation up to 50% in my country. Lies about inflation which is not 2% a year but more like 8%. Inflation is the highest tax, and they lie about it to hide how much you are losing.
I've often wondered what you can own that 1) holds value and 2) can't be taken from you (forced registration, taxation, debasement).
The only answers I came up with are precious metals (jews hoard this because they figured out it was a way to stop their assets from being stolen by governments), bitcoin, some pieces of art, and drugs. Maybe expensive wine bottles that you can store in your cellar.
My wife is a non EU resident. Because she comes from what is considered a third world country, her government is a bit more slow with crypto regulations and they do not have huge man power to knock on doors and go after your assets. They have other issues to resolve. I'm hoping I can find some loopholes. My wife owns a bank account there, and stopped working there 6 years ago but never gave up tax residency. Technically she is only a tax resident in the EU because she works here, but officially she has 2 tax residencies even though there is a treaty against double tax.
I wonder if she, as a Latin American citizen, can access something like bybit.com (not EU, where MiCA regulation applies).
If her national government demands tax, we can say that she works in Europe and get them to back off.
European tax authorities would not come looking for her on the .com platform.