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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Wow this whole story is a lie. The cops actually thought they “seized” the accounts because they knew the addresses, but never had the private keys! What a disaster

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Is there any actual way to "seize" a bitcoin collection without knowing the master key(s)?

You can blacklist certain addresses with certain law abiding exchanges, which is more like marked bills than a seizure. What happened here was obviously not a seizure, you’d need the private key(s) AND to have actually moved the bitcoin to a new secure wallet under your control before you could consider them seized.

You can't really. There's nothing stopping people from just moving them somewhere else, and then the ownership is anonymous again. If you blacklist all of the destinations, what if they send 0.00000001 to every single known exchange, are all of those addresses now on the blacklist? Of course not, this sort of thing is just nonsensical with an understanding of the system.

Of course you can. The regulated exchanges would (best case) just automatically remove the 0.00000001 BTC from the receiving wallet, or (worst case) freeze out the entire wallet indefinitely, while they send it back on the next block.

The regulated exhcanges have multiple forms of identification too so the recipient is screwed even if they manage to move it all before that happens.

What if the payment is made to their wallet? Do they "freeze" their own wallet?

The exchanges' wallet? In this hypothetical probably not, since the freeze is to prevent bad actors from siphoning the funds back out of the wallet, and the exchange isn't going to do that to itself.

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