Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)

The Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA, is the 1970 US law that requires financial institutions to keep records and file reports useful for detecting money laundering and tax evasion. Its best-known rule obliges banks to file a currency transaction report for cash transactions over 10,000 dollars, a threshold unchanged since enactment.

Why it matters

The BSA is the foundation of the entire US anti-money laundering regime, administered by FinCEN and expanded repeatedly, most significantly by the Patriot Act in 2001. It requires suspicious activity reports, customer identification programs, and recordkeeping that together define modern compliance. Because the 10,000 dollar threshold was never indexed to inflation, it captures a vastly larger share of transactions today than in 1970, when it equaled roughly 80,000 in today's dollars.

FinCEN classified crypto exchanges as money services businesses under the BSA in 2013, meaning bitcoin's regulated on-ramps carry the same reporting duties as banks. Structuring, deliberately splitting transactions to stay under thresholds, is itself a federal crime.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

The BSA touches both assets at the point of purchase. Precious metals dealers must report large cash transactions on Form 8300, and exchanges report crypto activity through the same framework. Privacy advocates in both camps make the same objection: the act inverts the usual presumption by requiring surveillance of lawful behavior. Its supporters answer that bearer assets, whether coins in a case or keys on a chip, are exactly why the reporting exists.