Protecting yourself from civil forfeiture abuses doesn’t make you a criminal. It does have the potential of protecting your assets from lawful theft, assuming you can hold onto your keys.
I was reading something recently, but I can't recall where, talking about one of the advantages of growing potatoes in feudal UK was that it was harder for the lord to steal them.
You never knew if the lord was a little short on money this month that he wouldn't show up with a wagon and cart off a bunch of your hay or vegetables (the fraction you were allowed to keep, not what you owed the lord) to sell.
Since you could leave root vegetables and tubers in the ground, there was a lot more friction in that process.
