zlacker

>>mikeyo+(OP)
Shouldn't all true crypto believers hate this news?

It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".

>>fxtent+35
Seems like a win to me. The government had to physically go to their house and arrest them to get to their funds, whereas normally all they had to do was call up their bank and had their money frozen. Not to mention, this threat could have been easily mitigated by keeping your funds in a multsig wallet, with the keys distributed in multiple redundant locations.

>>gruez+G6
> Not to mention, this threat could have been easily mitigated by keeping your funds in a multsig wallet, with the keys distributed in multiple redundant locations.

And if you're released from prison and recover your Bitcoin, you will be arrested again for contempt of court or a similar charge.

>>mschus+Rj
Why anyone would use BTC and not some privacy coin for this kind of scenario escapes me.

>>notch6+Tk
Is it practical to convert literal billions of dollars between currencies? And even if you did, wouldn't liquidating it so you can actually spend it on things in the real world prove to be almost impossible? Billions of dollars worth of currency is more than I'd expect most privacy coins to deal with over the course of months.

>>bastaw+7n
But in this case, accessing the billions in BTC was impossible too, so for all intents and purposes, that number wasn't real, since it wasn't usable.

The question is perhaps what is the most one can use and how to do it. Privacy coins probably play a part in this equation.

You maybe could slowly, and methodically convert it out of the privacy coin into a spendable form when needed.

>>PKop+sr
Laundering within the constraints of a public ledger isn't feasible for long periods of time or large amounts of money - the only way to win that game is to be so small nobody cares.

They could have possibly gotten cash from cartels at a steep discount, but that story would probably have ended with a richer cartel and two dead nerds.

>>robbed+vR
I always wonder how many people won this long con by being so small nobody cares. The DoJ document states they already succeeded in taking the funds cross chain and through some privacy enhancing alternative assets. For every idiot dumping millions in a bank account there's got to be someone else living a "modest" but luxurious life looking like a small guy nobody cares about, cashing out a few hundred to a thousand at a time somewhere where that kind of money is big enough to get a nice day to day living but small enough to not be worth organized crime taking much notice.

>>notch6+i41
On the flip side, most of us could already live quiet, comfortable lives in Thailand or Cambodia on our normal software engineering income.

Maybe these guys are thinking if you're going to be a criminal, you had better make the juice worth the squeeze. Live large, party extravagantly, and probably just rent everything from hotel rooms to yachts so there's less for the authorities to eventually impound when it catches up to you.