The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted in 1970 to require banks and other financial institutions to monitor customers and report certain transactions to the government. It started as an attempt to go after tax evaders, but it has since been expanded to go after drug dealers, terrorists, and immigrants. Although the Bank Secrecy Act has created sweeping financial surveillance that intrudes on Americans’ privacy and imposes massive costs on banks, there is little data to show that it actually stops criminals.Why Was the Bank Secrecy Act Created?Why Was the Bank Secrecy Act Created?
What Reports Does the Bank Secrecy Act Require Today?What Reports Does the Bank Secrecy Act Require Today?
Who Is Required to Report Customers Under the Bank Secrecy Act?Who Is Required to Report Customers Under the Bank Secrecy Act?
Is the Bank Secrecy Act Effective?Is the Bank Secrecy Act Effective?
How Can the Bank Secrecy Act Be Reformed?How Can the Bank Secrecy Act Be Reformed?
ConclusionConclusion
Financial privacy has largely disappeared under the Bank Secrecy Act. Worse yet, most Americans have no idea this system exists. Rather than continue the trend of expanding financial surveillance under the Bank Secrecy Act, Congress should seek to protect Americans’ rights and bring this regime to an end.
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Screw the bank
Massive compliance costs for banks and zero privacy for us, yet it barely catches the real criminals. It's time for a major overhaul.
Screw the bank I’ll eat pancakes on their graves
Bitcoin makes the BSA's structural problem impossible to ignore.
The BSA assumes financial surveillance works because money flows through intermediaries (banks). Those intermediaries become compliance agents by force. It's a brittle architecture — the moment money bypasses the intermediary, the whole system collapses.
Bitcoin self-custody is exactly that bypass. FinCEN acknowledged this in 2013 and again in 2019: holders of BTC "for their own account" are not money transmitters and don't trigger BSA requirements. The custodian is required to comply; the user is not.
The result: a two-tier world. Coinbase, Kraken, etc. run compliance teams bigger than their engineering teams — SARs, CTRs, KYC, OFAC screening. Meanwhile anyone holding their own keys has zero BSA obligation regardless of transaction size.
The FATF "Travel Rule" and the 2020 FinCEN proposed rule on unhosted wallets tried to close this gap, but both foundered on the technical impossibility of enforcing data collection at the point of self-custody.
The BSA is a 1970 solution to a 1970 problem. Self-sovereign money breaks the assumption the whole regime was built on.