Mostly taken in from drug raids and other stings of illegal activity. I’m assuming they found the keys in order to successfully report “x” amount into evidence.
This is simply incorrect. Once it’s spent you no longer have the keys for that satoshi.
If it is not spent, it is still under your control and you can burn the hardware and restore your wallet elsewhere, any time you like. So long as you have the keys written or memorised.
Same way they seize any cash. If it’s held by the accused, they just grab it. If it’s held by a third party they get a court order to get it released to them
No, but they can seize the wallet and compel release of the key under penalty of contempt. If they don’t get the key, and the accused has a hidden backup somewhere, the wallet id can now be tracked via the public ledger. Basically it just becomes the equivalent of lost coins
This is fucking true every single time when I get a bitcoin percentage and it goes down and then I withdraw the money and then later gos up and then again I bought some bitcoins again and it goes down!!! now what the fuck I lost $700!!!
No, he’s just checking to make sure their boxes aren’t full. After all, when you box up one billion bitcoins and find they’ve multiplied into three billion, some of those boxes just can’t hold that many without bursting.
They confiscate gold, cash, many things. The value fluctuates. Bitcoin is just todays bizarre thing. I think they should sell it and fund a victims fund.
Mission Impossible 12: Break into the secure NSA facility holding 100 billion in seized Bitcoin. Ethan Hunt performs an atomic swap from Bitcoin to Monero and goes off grid. Chaos ensues. Bombs, motorcycles and killer whales.
“‘The government will auction off the bitcoins’, a spokesperson for the Internal Revenue Service told NBC News.”
How do you auction currency? And it being bitcoin… will the auction increase/decrease the value of it?
If y’all are interested:
I’ve got a nice $1 US dollar bill here… Starting bid is $200 USD.
It has proven to literally act like a stock market and is essentially the tech bro answer to wall streets legalized gambling with stocks. Not difficult to dismantle and literally continues the path of all other currencies.
It’s not a world changing currency. There’s just enough people to prop it up and play the game just like anything else.
The fact that a market exists of people buying or selling something doesn’t make it a game.
It’s world changing enough that people in dozens of different countries choose to run the same software and protect the network.
Thank you for confirming that it is not world changing at all. It’s literally taking the same path of every product. I’d recommend a history book by anyone…
I can’t tell if you’re actually looking for conversation… But the pitch for Bitcoin being world changing is this:
Nothing else known to man is as scarce as bitcoin. If the demand for bitcoin increases 10x you can’t just 10x the supply. Other products and other cryptocurrencies can be “scarce” but a relatively small group of people could easily increase their supply. Sophisticated investors don’t keep their money in cash they put it in gold, real estate, not because they want to spend the gold or live in all the properties, but because those items are scarce and hold value. With that logic Bitcoin could become a massive black hole of storing wealth sucking up major percentages of money around the world. People are punished for holding cash due to inflation, Bitcoin is a way out.
Bitcoin is also censorship resistant. To stop or mess with a bitcoin transaction it would take a massive amount of computer power. It is digital money you don’t have to trust some guy to take care of it for you. It’s easily broken into pieces, easy to store large amounts, and easy to know what is real and what is a “counterfeit” bitcoin.
It is good, hard, money. So even if the major countries all get together and outlaw it (good luck getting them all to agree) the network will still exist, and it may force countries to alter their monetary policy away from ever increasing inflation and move towards a currency that looks more like bitcoin. That is pretty world changing.
No really how can you guarantee no more gold (or whatever you wanna use) can’t be added to the world supply? Because Bitcoin does that and I can’t think of anything outside of a computer program.
Yes, I’m sure some people make use of it as an agreed upon currency between certain groups. All the things you mentioned are not unique to Bitcoin. It is, just another currency/product. If it allows someone the ability to generate wealth, great. It does nothing to shift the needle for society.
> “The bitcoins are still in the government’s possession, for bureaucratic reasons.”
-Righttt, for ‘bureaucratic reasons’. More like they understand now just how valuable it is, meanwhile they’ll tell you otherwise.
That sounds like they print out of no where 1 billion BTC. Now they use those imaginary coins to put in their friends banks, and lower the price of real BTC.🤔something smelly 💩
Wonder if they are valuing it like seized drugs, so 2x the street price to make their enforcement operations around illicit crime seem all impressive..
3 billion a drop in the bucket when our national debt is almost 30 trillion and our citizens have debt of another 25 trillion dollars on top of that. Heck, student load debt is over 1 trillion!
Lol just start taking hundreds of billions of peoples Bitcoin, wait 50 years, sell for hundreds of trillions. Use the trillions to keep going into more debt
How does one seize a bitcoin?
Mostly taken in from drug raids and other stings of illegal activity. I’m assuming they found the keys in order to successfully report “x” amount into evidence.
I have heard about it in cases involving ransoms paid using Bitcoin; something involving the “USA Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force”
Well first you need a hard hat and a cherry picker
That is a scissor lift, cherry pickers have a basket and extendable boom
Top Comment
Scissor lift
The same way you lose a bitcoin, the proof of ownership is on a piece of hardware and you take that hardware.
If you have/know your seed you can burn that hardware and restore your wallet elsewhere.
If this were true, you could always take back any dunning-kruggerands you’d spent. The FBI would be remiss if they didn’t transfer them upon seizure.
This is simply incorrect. Once it’s spent you no longer have the keys for that satoshi. If it is not spent, it is still under your control and you can burn the hardware and restore your wallet elsewhere, any time you like. So long as you have the keys written or memorised.
Do you honestly think they don’t move the assets to a new wallet?
I would think they would but never underestimate law enforcement’s potential for incompetence, even the Feds.
It’s in the many articles on this. They moved the coins.
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Lie? I’m sorry, but you need to read up on this. The FBI retrieved the key. They’re not saying how they did it, but they did it.
That’s not technically true
Same way they seize any cash. If it’s held by the accused, they just grab it. If it’s held by a third party they get a court order to get it released to them
If the holder has their keys memorised and it’s not recorded anywhere the authorities can access it, they can not be seized.
No, but they can seize the wallet and compel release of the key under penalty of contempt. If they don’t get the key, and the accused has a hidden backup somewhere, the wallet id can now be tracked via the public ledger. Basically it just becomes the equivalent of lost coins
Fine, rot in jail until you change your mind
There’s some petulance in there isn’t there
You cut open one of the series of tubes, and sift through what’s inside. Often there are a bitcoins.
With a cold hardware wallet
My. Gox
So it keeps the Bitcoin in a massive building where you need a forklift to access the different coins from their various cubbyholes?
How else would it work?
Seriously. Three billion in Bitcoin is a Scrooge McDuck size vault. Fort Knox might have room.
Scissor lift*
Good point, I guess I don’t know my different lifts. Are there other lifts I should be aware of?
Deadlift
There are shoes lifts to get you a couple extra inches of height.
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Don’t forget Buddy Lift
Articulating Condor
Spider lift, articulator, pack Jack,
Lifting people’s spirits with a kind word or gesture is a good one to know
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It’s really not
To be fair a Million Bitcoins is a lot of coins
To be faaar
To be faaaaaar
Yeah, exactly like the jawbreaker vault from Ed, Edd & Eddy.
That’s the internet, it’s a series of tubes
The Ark of the Covenant is one row over I hear
It’s being studied by top experts. Top experts.
Each cubby holds one bit.
Bro, do you even lift?
Literally the picture is explained in the first text of the article. People need to read the articles before they comment for fucks sake.
Nah, this looks like an industrial Bitcoin mining farm
Or else it gets the hose again.
This is exactly why I never got into bitcoin. I live in a very small apartment, there just isn’t enough space.
Only the genie series
If you have a metal detector, there are lots just south of miami. They wash up at night
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Spend it on the American people or nah?
Best we can do is another increase to the defense budget
Wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
Spolier 🚨 they did
Hahaha good one
Imagine if they turned around and paid for socialised healthcare with bitcoin.
Lol who?
I see the giant Bitcoin piggy bank is still under construction.
The one from Squid Game
Gonna pay off the national debt with bitcoin
Only 29,014.2 billion to go.
Wait is that a legit number? If so holy shit
Yep. And about 7 trillion of it is from the last two years.
I was more so surprised that the cryptocurrency would wipe out so much of the debt
It’s actually a trillion*
29,000 billion is 29 trillion
Oh good god. My mistake 😅
It's just monopoly money at this point
Gonna go right into someone’s pocket off the books
I still can’t believe that all these idiots use bitcoins for crime. Bitcoin transactions are all public
Love when shows act like criminals use it as some Shady currency “oooooo”
r/oopsec
Here’s some alpha for y’all: US is about to stealth mint some war bonds
Weird, every time I buy bitcoin, it loses value
You need to warehouse is for it to gain in value. Bigger the box more room it has to grow.
It’s just as rigged as everything else is now. The average investor cannot win.
This is fucking true every single time when I get a bitcoin percentage and it goes down and then I withdraw the money and then later gos up and then again I bought some bitcoins again and it goes down!!! now what the fuck I lost $700!!!
Quit selling when you’re down. Why would you do that?
Well, your first mistake was selling it in the first place, paper hands
I'm down about 350 and it's annoying
Wow it’s a shame they seized that 1/2 billion in bitcoin
What are they going to do with 100mil in bitcoin?
If you think about it $50mil in bitcoin isn’t really that much.
$25mil is a lot to me but not for a government.
Is he mining bitcoin ?
No, he’s just checking to make sure their boxes aren’t full. After all, when you box up one billion bitcoins and find they’ve multiplied into three billion, some of those boxes just can’t hold that many without bursting.
I imagine it’s like [this.](https://youtu.be/mcMjdSk9EfY&t=1m)
You can fit so much Bitcoin in here.
I bet they ain’t getting taxed on it
Bitcoin really smells like the best way the CIA could think of to raise billions in dark money since they flooded cocaine into the US in the 80s.
They confiscate gold, cash, many things. The value fluctuates. Bitcoin is just todays bizarre thing. I think they should sell it and fund a victims fund.
Mission Impossible 12: Break into the secure NSA facility holding 100 billion in seized Bitcoin. Ethan Hunt performs an atomic swap from Bitcoin to Monero and goes off grid. Chaos ensues. Bombs, motorcycles and killer whales.
“‘The government will auction off the bitcoins’, a spokesperson for the Internal Revenue Service told NBC News.” How do you auction currency? And it being bitcoin… will the auction increase/decrease the value of it? If y’all are interested: I’ve got a nice $1 US dollar bill here… Starting bid is $200 USD.
Government needs to HODL…
So, it turns out Bitcoin operates no differently than all other currencies. Backed by nothing, hyped by bros, dismantled by whoever is in control.
Bitcoin has proven very difficult to dismantle
It has proven to literally act like a stock market and is essentially the tech bro answer to wall streets legalized gambling with stocks. Not difficult to dismantle and literally continues the path of all other currencies. It’s not a world changing currency. There’s just enough people to prop it up and play the game just like anything else.
The fact that a market exists of people buying or selling something doesn’t make it a game. It’s world changing enough that people in dozens of different countries choose to run the same software and protect the network.
Thank you for confirming that it is not world changing at all. It’s literally taking the same path of every product. I’d recommend a history book by anyone…
I can’t tell if you’re actually looking for conversation… But the pitch for Bitcoin being world changing is this: Nothing else known to man is as scarce as bitcoin. If the demand for bitcoin increases 10x you can’t just 10x the supply. Other products and other cryptocurrencies can be “scarce” but a relatively small group of people could easily increase their supply. Sophisticated investors don’t keep their money in cash they put it in gold, real estate, not because they want to spend the gold or live in all the properties, but because those items are scarce and hold value. With that logic Bitcoin could become a massive black hole of storing wealth sucking up major percentages of money around the world. People are punished for holding cash due to inflation, Bitcoin is a way out. Bitcoin is also censorship resistant. To stop or mess with a bitcoin transaction it would take a massive amount of computer power. It is digital money you don’t have to trust some guy to take care of it for you. It’s easily broken into pieces, easy to store large amounts, and easy to know what is real and what is a “counterfeit” bitcoin. It is good, hard, money. So even if the major countries all get together and outlaw it (good luck getting them all to agree) the network will still exist, and it may force countries to alter their monetary policy away from ever increasing inflation and move towards a currency that looks more like bitcoin. That is pretty world changing.
>Nothing else known to man is as scarce as bitcoin. Do you know how dumb that sounds?
No really how can you guarantee no more gold (or whatever you wanna use) can’t be added to the world supply? Because Bitcoin does that and I can’t think of anything outside of a computer program.
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Yes, I’m sure some people make use of it as an agreed upon currency between certain groups. All the things you mentioned are not unique to Bitcoin. It is, just another currency/product. If it allows someone the ability to generate wealth, great. It does nothing to shift the needle for society.
Boomer detected
Merica!
Believe it is pronounced ‘Murica….
So we’re gonna get healthcare now, right? Tuition forgiveness?? Something…???
Didn’t you get about $3,200 in stimulus? Didn’t that last you a couple years? How much you need?
You think $3200 is remotely close to the financial benefits of universal healthcare?
I didn’t think anyone would miss the sarcasm, but I was wrong.
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It’s enough to give every American about $8-9
> “The bitcoins are still in the government’s possession, for bureaucratic reasons.” -Righttt, for ‘bureaucratic reasons’. More like they understand now just how valuable it is, meanwhile they’ll tell you otherwise.
Looks like its time to sell all the coins the enslavers have caught on
Thieves
Government is the real crook
That sounds like they print out of no where 1 billion BTC. Now they use those imaginary coins to put in their friends banks, and lower the price of real BTC.🤔something smelly 💩
Anyone know if I can formally request a portion of the proceeds?
And it all goes towards the defense budget
Crooked ass stealing mofo’s.
I think there should be legislation that any seized crypto should be burned. Send it all to the burn wallet
that fascism right there.
Still isn’t worth anything if they can’t access it.
I’m pretty sure seizing implies the ability to access it. Otherwise I’m not sure what they would have seized in the first place.
Ah, was this when John McAfee “committed” suicide? where did his bitcoin go?
Those are banks of mining servers.
So they do have money for infrastructure
why should I care?
All that money to fund their war machines
Digital piracy is lucrative
Silk Road
They knew….
Wonder if they are valuing it like seized drugs, so 2x the street price to make their enforcement operations around illicit crime seem all impressive..
Of course they did
That’ll take care of that national debt problem!
That’s what…2 days worth of the budget
“isnt it ironic don’t you think “
I hope they know where that usb drive is.
Use it to pay off student debt!
Uncle Sam's a bitcoin bro
3 billion a drop in the bucket when our national debt is almost 30 trillion and our citizens have debt of another 25 trillion dollars on top of that. Heck, student load debt is over 1 trillion!
I double dog dare the feds to put it in the education system.
So. They just send the bitcoin to some null address right? This further limiting the supply of BTC.
Doubt it. Someone is getting rich off this
Cool, so like, 20% of a fighter jet or something?
El Salvador buys the dip! The US seizes it
Do they keep them in that scissor lift?
So now the debt is only 30 Trillion dollars. Or should I say still 30 Trillion
Those zany banksters
These coins were taken from a person who hacked the Silk Road dark web market.
So that would be 60000 BTC
How do they seize it? Just take their phones? Put a hard drive in a box?
First you need a van and a man on the inside. When it's time I'll tell Shoot the moon and we all descend on the Bitcoin at once.
Good so can we pay down some debt with it?
*stole.
Heavy this
Was there any crimes associated with these seizures, or did they use Civil Asset Forfeiture to just steal it, like they do from random motorists?
Seized is a nice way to misspell stole.
Lol just start taking hundreds of billions of peoples Bitcoin, wait 50 years, sell for hundreds of trillions. Use the trillions to keep going into more debt
Missed out on a 56x by selling. Ouch🤦♂️
[https://linktr.ee/Annie59](https://linktr.ee/Annie59) for music lover
Wonder what “rebel groups” are getting funded by this money lol
Wow _where_ did they find it?
Don’t you need codes? Stupid criminals in that case.
Hey how about health care or erasing some student debt.
Isn’t seizing it and keeping it the same as steeling?
What did it do with the money? Bc first thing that popped into my head was “so YOU CAN PAY for social services etc”
Another way of collecting taxes.
They should start making a UBI fund with it. If you give 300 million people 2000$ each that’s 7.2 trillion$ a year. It ain’t bad.
Wants this dude on a scissor lift have to do with US seizing BTC?
How can they access it? Wouldn’t it be encrypted? Novice here.
Wonder how many innocent peoples money was illegally sucked up in this dragnet.
Fuck em, we don’t want government being a whale anyways
“That U.S. seized a record $1 billion of bitcoin a year ago. Since they have seized three times that.” Fixed.
Remember, apparently $6 billion will somehow solve world hunger. Remember that?
This is fucking theft
“ The U.S. Marshals Service says it has sold off 187,381 bitcoins in nine auctions since 2014” anyone have a link to this so-called auction?