France Wants to Know About Your €100K Bitcoin Stash, and the Threshold Is the Whole Story

France just put a number on self-custody, and that's the part everyone should be paying attention to. A budget amendment now circulating in Paris would require taxpayers to declare crypto held outside regulated platforms once the total crosses 100,000 euros, which works out to roughly $112,000 at current rates. Not the gains. Not the trades. The holdings themselves. The amendment still has to survive the budget process, so this isn't law yet, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

What the Amendment Actually Does

Here's what the filing actually says, stripped of the jargon. If you're a French tax resident and you hold crypto on a hardware wallet, in a self-hosted wallet, or on a non-custodial app, and the total value crosses that 100,000 euro line, you'd be expected to tell the tax authority about it. Declaration, not confiscation. Disclosure, not taxation of unrealized gains. That distinction matters, and it's the part most of the angry posts on crypto Twitter skipped right past.

France already has a reporting regime for foreign-held crypto accounts, and the penalties in the tax code run to 1,500 euros per undeclared account, rising to 10,000 euros in the toughest cases. So the machinery exists. This amendment extends it to the one place the machinery can't see.

And that's the real story. Every serious reporting regime on the books right now depends on an intermediary. The EU's DAC8 directive starts applying from January 1, 2026, and it puts the burden on crypto service providers to report on their customers. The OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, which is the model DAC8 was built from, goes live across dozens of jurisdictions from 2027. Both are elegant solutions. Both have the same blind spot. If no platform holds your keys, no platform files a form about you.

The 100,000 euro figure isn't random, either. It's high enough to sound like it only hits the wealthy, and low enough that a French dentist who bought bitcoin in 2019 crosses it in a decent bull market without ever thinking of herself as a whale. From a compliance standpoint, the threshold is doing two jobs at once. It keeps the enforcement apparatus focused on accounts worth chasing, and it quietly shifts the burden of proof onto the person holding the keys.

The Case Against, and It's Not Weak

The counterargument deserves a fair hearing. Privacy advocates will tell you any declaration requirement is a beachhead, and they're not wrong about the pattern. Once a jurisdiction establishes that self-custody is reportable, the threshold becomes a dial, and dials get turned. Today's 100,000 euros is tomorrow's 25,000. The precedent here's important, and everyone on both sides of this debate knows it.

There's a practical problem too. How do you value a self-custodied position on December 31 of a given year, and what happens when the holder disagrees with the tax authority's price feed? Cost basis for coins bought on three different exchanges in four different years, moved to a wallet, partly spent, partly swapped, is a genuine accounting nightmare for anyone who isn't running portfolio software. You can already picture the audit disputes.

And then there's the oldest objection of all. Capital moves. France has spent a decade watching wealthy residents relocate to Portugal, Switzerland, and Dubai, and the country's budget process is a meat grinder that has chewed up plenty of amendments before they ever reached a final vote. There's a reasonable chance this one gets diluted, delayed, or dropped entirely when the negotiations get real. Enforcement is another question. A tax authority can't inspect your Ledger. It can only trust that you'll volunteer the information.

Which raises the question nobody in Paris wants to answer out loud. If the rule only catches the honest, and the honest are mostly small holders who'd rather comply than risk a 10,000 euro penalty, what's the actual revenue here? Probably not much. So why bother?

My Verdict: This Isn't About Revenue

Because it was never about the money. It's about establishing jurisdiction over the last unobserved corner of crypto, and doing it before anyone else writes the template. France has been unusually deliberate about this. It moved early on MiCA implementation, it's been ahead of most of the bloc on DAC8 readiness, and now it's testing the self-custody question while the rest of the EU is still arguing about exchange reporting. Reading between the lines, this is France auditioning to be the compliance reference point for the eurozone.

So here's my call, and I'll commit to it. Some version of this reporting requirement becomes law, either in this budget cycle or the next, and it gets copied by at least three other EU member states within two years. The threshold will move. The filing will get simpler, because tax authorities hate complexity as much as taxpayers do. And the honest middle of the market, the person with 120,000 euros in bitcoin and no accountant, will absorb the cost.

The winners here are boring and predictable. Compliance software. Tax lawyers in Paris. Custodians who can now pitch themselves as the painless alternative to self-reporting, since a regulated platform files for you. The losers are the privacy absolutists, who will be told, correctly, that every other asset class already has a disclosure regime, and that crypto's exemption was always the anomaly rather than the right.

What regulators are really signaling is simpler than the amendment text suggests. They're not trying to take your coins. They want a map. And once one major economy has a map of self-custody, every other finance ministry in the G20 is going to want the same one, drawn the same way. Watch the December negotiations closely. The number that survives the budget process, more than the rule itself, is what everyone else will copy.