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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • No, you won’t have to pay taxes on that cash when importing it. But you can bet that CBP will ask nosy questions about where you got it. And unless you can satisfy them that you got it by legitimate means, they will assume you got it by illegal means and confiscate it. It’s called “civil asset forfeiture”. Look it up.

    However, as a US citizen you still technically owe income taxes on all your worldwide income. But you would settle that with the IRS regardless of whether or not the money ever makes it back to the US.

    Now, this situation is one of the few legitimate use cases for crypto. Find someone locally who will sell you a few hundred BTC with that cash, and now CBP has nothing to find at the airport. Then cash it out once you are in the States. The IRS would still be interested in where you got the money, because they monitor all the ways to get cash out of the Crypto ecosystem into the US. But, as long as you have documentation of your lottery win (and crypto transfers) and file it all it shouldn’t be an issue. I would prefer to take my chances as a documemted rich person by the IRS than as a rando who shows up at Newark with a briefcase of foreign currency.


  • The toilet handled solid and liquid waste differently. Solid waste was stored for disposal on earth, liquid waste was stored in a smaller container and intended to be periodically vented out into the void. But the mechanism for that froze, and the container they had to store it in was too small for the whole trip, so they had to use a backup supply of pee bags for pee instead of the toilet.

    I wonder if we were saved from an even worse fate, and if the toilet had worked as planned we would be destroyed at some point in the future by a race of aliens who we accidentally peed on when we threw our pee overboard in space









  • Every defendant in the US is entitled to a presumption of innocence, and the Prosecution is obligated to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. So, a defense attorney can be seen as performing a valuable service, to keep Prosecutors in check, and make sure they are doing their jobs correctly.

    But I do wonder sometimes if these defense attorneys ask their clients whether or not they did the thing, or if they expressly say “Don’t tell me whether or not you did it”…







  • Tether is an interesting experiment here. They are traded as smart contract tokens on top of various blockchains. They don’t really have any intrinsic value, other than Tether LTD saying “every Tether is 100% backed by currency reserves”, and releasing unsatisfactory “audits” now and then. It’s main utility is that it provides foreign exchanges with a way to trade in something that is like Dollars without opening them up to the regulation that comes with trading actual dollars. It’s market cap is currently in excess of $180 B.

    But, USDT has been around, in one form or another, since 2015. And while other “innovative” crypto products have crashed and burned, Tether has been able to keep its peg and has never failed to meet redemptions. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be a scam. It’s whole point is to always be worth one currency unit, so all they have to do is invest that currency in safe conventional investments and they can literally make billions of dollars with very little overhead. The most obvious answer is that they are not a scam.

    I still don’t really trust them, but I have used them on exchanges, always making sure to trade through Tether to something I can redeem on a US exchange for actual dollars. But, I have to acknowledge they have lasted longer than most crypto entities. I wish they would get a complete audit together, but at some point their reputation for having lasted so long needs to be worth something?