4 ms·

Seizing is a legal construct. It's not "I'm grabbing hold" seizing. It's the "I've had a judge validate that legally I am now the owner" variant.

• throw101010 4y ago
  Seems like this legal construct is very inefficient at "seizing" bitcoins. Bitcoin is a bearer asset like no other. A house, cash, your gold stash, etc., when "seized", can be used by the state without consulting you once you are put in a hole (rightfully or not). The state has to adapt to this kind of new asset. The closest that existed before was burying your tangible assets somewhere without anybody knowing about it. But this is just not feasible for many assets obviously, and still very cumbersome when you want to use them. With Bitcoin you just need to generate private keys offline properly to achieve the same purpose.
  • slavik81 4y ago
    The state will eventually just require that exchanges check the history of any bitcoins they touch against a list of seized coins. There's not much you can do with a big pile of illicit cash if everyone you'd want to transact with is checking the serial numbers.
• bigiain 4y ago
  Yeah, it's like "We don't actually have the money/bitcoin in our posession, but as soon as Gary started spending the sequentially numbered bills and/or moving the permanently trackable by design Bitcoins, we can show up and arrest him for having stolen them from us." Like the informant said, Gary is not the sharpest tool in the box.