THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TOOK ABOUT $84 MILLION FROM CAPSTONE’S ACCOUNTS AT WELLS FARGO AND JPMORGAN — IT IS A CIVIL FORFEITURE, NOT A CONVICTION — AND THE COMPANY SAYS IT WILL FIGHT IT

The Justice Department took about $84 million from a Montana payments company called Capstone. Roughly $81 million of it sat in two Wells Fargo accounts. Another $2.06 million was at JPMorgan Chase. The government filed a civil forfeiture action in the Eastern District of California and the money moved.

Read that again. Nobody has been convicted of anything. Capstone denies wrongdoing and says it will challenge the complaint. Civil forfeiture does not require a conviction, because the case is filed against the property rather than against a person, and property does not get a lawyer or a jury.

The government says Capstone ran an unlicensed money transmitting business in at least six states and told its banks it was a technology services company. That may all be proven. It is also not the part that should hold your attention. The reason $84 million was available to take in a single order is that it was sitting in accounts with a company's name on them at two of the largest banks in the country.

Keep money in a bank if that is what the business needs. Just be clear about what a bank balance is. It is a claim on somebody else's ledger, and the somebody else answers a court before they answer you. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,023.