$250
Discussion
I talked with them. It’s minimal fee to set up but 3% round trip fee, half paid upon purchase and half at time of sale, assuming they don’t change the agreement before you sell.
Rolling over GBTC would make sense, but from a 0.25% etf might take far more than 12 years to pay off, if ever, because you lose 1.5% of your coins instantly.
It’s still not clear to me how they handle multisig. Do you hold 2 keys? Ie, Can you unilaterally prevent coins from moving? Can you unilaterally spend coins? If so, you’re giving away 1.5% of your coins for a very large degree of protection (and if your coins have yet to be purchased, you’re really only talking 0.5% as a 1% spread is normal on retail exchanges).
I suppose it could make sense if you can put appreciated bitcoin into your IRA and take the dollar amount contributed as a tax write off…I didn’t ask about that.
yes, u hold 2 keys. there is nothing preventing you, except from IRA tax implications, from moving the btc on your own
That’s useful. If you assign a 1 in 67 to 1 in 200 odds of government confiscation of third party held bitcoin, then this IRA makes sense (roll over vs. newly bought). Or I should say when you feel probability of such confiscation reaches that high it definitely makes sense.
I need to ask them about putting bitcoin into ira directly (in kind). Because this way I can get tax discounts for declaring ownership of some coin…I have fully KYC’d coins I could do this without losing privacy (since I never had it on those coins).
i know on their website unchained says they accept inkind rollovers of ira btc, but i have heard people on nostr say that swan “wouldn’t” send the transfer in their end, makes them cash it out to roll over, so probably a fine print thing with different companies
Definitely worth reading small print. Very very very few people already have actual bitcoin in an IRA. Self custody gold IRA holders have gone to court for the theoretical crime of giving themselves the ability to undetectably spend IRA gold without government being able to detect/prosecute with pre-collected evidence.
My understanding is that the law/irs regulation doesn’t permit these IRAs explicitly, in fact, it prohibits them, but the only valid goal of the law is really about being able to prove innocence of a crime…until bitcoin, this couldn’t be done and language of law is vague/incomplete/inappropriate in the bitcoin era. Eventually law/rule will get rewritten to properly reflect the limits the people have granted to government authority.
i forget the exact case, but when i was doing my initial research, there was a SCOTUS case a few years back which ruled that the IRA institutional holding 1 key met the “custodial requirements” for all laws pertaining to IRA custodians.
unchained files all the paperwork, they are the legal “custodian” of the ira, if you moved the coins, they would legally be required to report it, and you would have subject to all early withdrawal penalties
or a federal district court, i forget
they play the IRA legaleze, and u just sit back having control over 2 keys in a 2/3 multisig
if they go out of business, u have 2 keys so ur good. if u lose a key, they have another so your good
it all depends on your situation and your own preferences.
the fee’s might be a little higher than swan or river, so it’s really whatever you value more, an institution holding ur IRA btc for less, or you holding ur IRA btc for more
I don’t think there are really any wrong answers to these questions.
The new fidelity crypto retirement product is supposedly very low fee. I suppose that means it undercuts their 0.25% per year FBTC…
Retirement products necessarily require a tax advantage to make sense…so this can only apply to a certain fraction of one’s wealth/income. But there’s no great reason to give government more taxes than necessary.