Get known for going to estate sales and buying blind boxes … you simply keep finding stuff in the boxes and selling it a few items at a time. Put your money in estate jewelry when it is new and sell that as if you got it in your blind box. See, lots of people sell off great granny’s cheap costume jewelry but do not realize that some of it is actually rare and valuable =) You can also manage a fair amount of bits and pieces of gold coins as many people collected stuff when traveling that are parts of womens dowry pieces. hell, I have made my own medieval turkmenistani clothing that is almost clanking with coins and assorted silver and lapis/coral/amber pieces. I used modern pieces, but you can find gold and gem instead of silver and glass stuff in museums, and people did collect the real deal, and it does show up in auctions =) You could be known for buying the estate blind boxes cheap [often I got them at $5 per box when I was a kid and dragged to auctions =)] and have really good luck finding stuff =)
In England the gold should be no problem. Under the Treasue Act if the hoard is found on your land it belongs to the Crown but you get the value. If you don’t want to own the land just make an agreement to split the proceeds with the owner before you “find” the gold. Mind you 500lb may be a problem as it is way, way more than anyone has ever found before and would be worth more than any museum could pay! The Staffordshire Hoard was about 15lb of bashed up gold and silver items and was valued at GBP 3.3M - God knows what 500lb of Viking gold in pristine condition would be worth.
Do remember to plant it somewhere credible - plenty of places in England where Viking gold might be found - and try to make a real mess digging it up. The archeologists will be furious but you don’t want them to realise it has only been buried for 10 minutes. 
The easier solution is to set it up as a corporation. Appoint an attorney and a CPA to manage and represent the corporation, keeping all filings and tax payments up to date. Make ownership of the corporation based on bearer stock. When you show up in the present bearing 100% of the stock certificates, you have a perfectly legal ownership claim to the corporation. As the sole shareholder, you can then dissolve it and distribute the assets to yourself.
Man, you do things the hard way. Raiding Viking tombs? Aren’t there like curses you have to deal with? And, not to mention vikings who might not feel to friendly towards someone stealing their friends gold. (After all, that’s what they were planning to do.) Why not simply go back in time, and play the stock market.
Back in 1998, I bought Apple at $8 per share (or something like that) when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. I sold it about a year later for $20 thinking about the great killing I made on the market. About a year ago, my son pointed out to me that if I held onto Apple until now, my initial investment would be worth over a million dollars.
Imagine buying Apple when it was at a all time low of $6 per share and riding it till 2000 when it dropped once more, then picking it up a few years later. Imagine in 1998 finding a couple of guys working on something called “Internet Searching” and offered them a few thousand dollars of funding. And, those two guys happened to have founded Google. Or investing in China before people thought it’d be the world’s economic powerhouse. Make the right investment decisions over the years, and you’d have more money than that Viking gold without all the hassle of dealing with Vikings.
Or, if you want to do it the easy way, just go to next week (you’ve got a freaking time machine after all), find the winning PowerBall lottery numbers, and buy a ticket for this week. That’s $37 million dollars and no one asks any questions about time machines.
Like I say to all criminals with laundry needs.
Art is the answer.
Buy it, or even make it… it has literally no other value than what people are willing to pay for it.
Throw paint at a canvas, buy it off yourself for loads of cash, and report the income. Or use the time machine to go toss a gold bar at a starving artist… like Van Gogh?
Don’t forget - when the FBI or Treasury gets ahold of gold, they can do spectroscopic analysis of the ratio of minute contaminants and effectively determine where it came from. (IIRC, this was a key point in some thriller novel about Nazi gold). So you will not only attract the attention of authorities but then have a lot of embarassing questions to answer about importation, how long you’ve had it, etc.
As others have pointed out, most “buried treasure” and especially shipwreck finds are heavily covered by laws that effectively take as much as they can get from you.
IMHO - Your best bet is to set up an obscure trust corporation in Switzerland or somewhere. Spend a few months or real-time building up its reputation, visiting the trustee lawyers every few decades in Geneva, and dropping off deposits from time to time. They can handle the niceties of obtaining and laundering cash for you - drop them a snail-mail from a few months before you need any spending cash.
For lifestyle in say, 1950’s Monaco, you are the American nephew who inherited Uncle Archibald’s vast european holdings, and hence all the bank drafts from Switzerland to finance your lifestyle. After all, if you have billions, why live in today when there’s the 1950s? (Unless you’re black, I guess). No AIDS, minimal mandatory reporting, no monewy laundering laws, plenty of tax loopholes for the rich and no pesky hi-tech databases to cross-reference data, Swiss Banks could maintain their privacy, etc.
Who pointed that out? The laws are actually, for the most part, finders keepers. The only way the government gets a share is through taxes, which would work the same way as for any other windfall.
And since 1974, as well. (And from 1933-1974 with a license.)
Buy a house.
Find it in the attic.
Pay your taxes.
Buy bigger house.
Depends where you are. In Britain, for instance, that is not always true. Depending on a number of factors it may be yours to keep or sell, or it may be Crown property (in which case you will be given the estimated monetary value of the find), or the finder may not have any right to it at all.
Trying to deposit $1 million in 1965 currency is foolish. You draw attention to yourself in at least two ways: the bills clearly are not in circulation, but give no evidence of the wear and tear they should have accummulated over 45 years; and of course the bank has to report the deposit no matter how you do it. If you try to deposit it in smallish batches–$1,000 at a time, say, so as to not trip reporting laws–the bank is still going to notice and you’ll get dinged for that. The fact that your gains are not ill-gotten is little help, as you want to avoid suspicion. (I take it from the OP that you haven’t any super-tech other than the time machine.)
Again risky. You are drawing attention to yourself.
If you have invented a time-travell machine, you obviously live in a universe in which time travel is possible. If you’ve invented the device, then it’s likely the US government and GE and the Russians and so forth are all either researching the possibility as well, or doing it surreptitiously. The parties already possing the tech may not care; but you don’t REALLY want the Russians coming after you to steal your research and put you to work, no?
Pssst. The OP has a time machine. He can make anything as old as he wants it to be.
Is there no way to have the taxes automatically taken out? I remember when I had to cash out part of my IRA, I was able to have them withhold the appropriate amount of taxes. I guess technically I was still supposed to fill out a tax return, but I wouldn’t have owed any taxes. And even for that, couldn’t you just have an accounting firm fill everything out for you?
I think the buried/sunken treasure is the best solution I’ve heard so far. Only issues are hoping nobody finds it before you (but if so, I guess you can always go back in time and move it after it would have fore-been post-found… Ow, darn those time travel tense conjugations!) and for sunken treasure spending a year or two building up a treasure-hunting resume.
The other solution I like requires a great-grandfather (or similar) who lived in a civilized city. Go back, impersonating your great-grandpa and set up a secret self-sustaining trust, with rules such that your present self will be the major beneficiary (takes a little creative lawyering, but nothing impossible). Maybe even plant some evidence for a cover story (he was secretly socking away a few dollars each week, or maybe a huge gambling win. Even better if he was publicly opposed to gambling, which gives a plausible reason for him hiding the loot). Return, create a plausible reason for the trust being exposed and disbursed, and you’re good to go.
Given you have a time machine, you are thinking about it the wrong way - the most valuable thing you can have is information about the future, not any trinkets from the past.
Here’s what you do:
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Set up a nice cozy apartment/house with internet access and pay all your bills 2 years in advance.
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Take your time machine 1 year into the future. Pop into your future-house and print out a daily chart of the SP500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average.
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Go back to the present. Spend the next year investing/trading knowing exactly what the market is going to do. You will be as rich as you could possibly hope to be in one year, and entirely legitimate.
I had a thought. Why not bring back you gold hoard or whatever, openly sell and declare it and pay taxes. When the gummint comes around (as they will) to ask where you got it simply tell them the truth. Obviously they won’t believe you but they cannot prove you lied. They will freak out if you offer to demonstrate and will do anything (even believe you) to stop from revealing your secrets.
There was a science-fiction story written many years ago. A girl is raised to the age of, say 20, made to memorize all sorts of things–stock movements, World Series winners, NFL champions ( think this predated the Super Bowl), NBA champions and the like. She gets pregnant. Then there is a singularity in time and she wakes up 20 years earlier, gives birth to girl and then raises her daughter in exactly the same way she was raised, while using the information he memorized to make a very good living. She realized that she would get to live the rest of her life with her accumulated wealth after her pregnant daughter disappeared.
Well, yes, withholding could be taken out, but the forms would not be filed. You could hire a Lawyer and give him a POA.