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Comment by schlopper | Hacker News Reader

Something's off about the article:

"Authorities have seized his digital wallet"

How do you seize a digital wallet when all you need to access or recreate it is a private key (or recovery text)? What have they seized exactly?

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They've seized the file, but don't have the key. So, they haven't seized anything really, as I am pretty sure the guy has a copy of that file.

Sure, ok, so they have an encrypted version of the private key!?

From the Wiki:

> The wallet.dat file is located in the Bitcoin data directory and may be encrypted with a password.

I guess they have the encrypted wallet.dat, but not the password for decrypting it.

Obviously it has been seized. They put it in the /police/property/seized dir and therefore it is the government's!

More likely C:\Users\OfficerDibble\Desktop\

If he doesn't have a copy of the file, then even if the cops can't access it, semantically they could be said to have seized them?

He might know the 12 word key phrase. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

If you have a paper wallet or memorized it, that file doesn't really matter though. Nothing was seized other than encrypted data.

Exactly. They have seized nothing, apparently. The author over at the verge apparently doesn‘t get it either. The only way this would make any sense is if we were looking at a multi-sig wallet where police has seized one out of two necessary keys, where the second one is a brain wallet or hidden somewhere.

I imagine that if he tries to spend it, that would be considered theft

The owner could hold and hope for another fork to happen if it ever does and spend on the fork side.

If they were determined and willing to break the law they'll probably wait to do a crypto swap. Trading BTC for another crypto that is easier to hide behind in the future.

The usual arguments I get is none of this matters because the individual won't be able to spend the crypto into anything of value. Government will monitor the wallet and then monitor any assets, securities, etc the German man has.

Nobody knows what the future will look like though and what happens if any country comes out supporting crypto as their default day to day currency? German man moves, becomes citizen, denounces his German citizenship to not need to report anything and is able to exchange crypto for assets and securities.

For $60M today and what might be +$100M when the time comes I'm sure there will be a path of spending 90%, keeping 10% and living a life of very little worry.

>The owner could hold and hope for another fork to happen if it ever does and spend on the fork side.

Or move to the country next door.

For 60 mils, uprooting yourself is definitely an option.

You'll probably find that Germany has extradition treaties with most countries worth living in though.

>most countries worth living in

With 60 mils USD in pocket. the list of "countries worth living in" becomes a lot longer than you may think.

Who can argue with amazing arguments like "Bitcoin is the money of the future because it will allow a fraudster to keep the proceeds of his crimes!"

  > Who can argue with amazing arguments like "Bitcoin is the 
  > money of the future because it will allow a fraudster to keep 
  > the proceeds of his crimes!"

The benefits outweigh the costs. Fiat currency is used for plenty of bad things, like funding wars and proxy wars. It would be a net gain if, for instance, fraudsters were a little more able to steal from gullible people but governments couldn't fight as many wars. Gullibility can, with proper education, be fixed, after all.

You could exit the country and do whatever you want if it's come to that.

| How do you seize a digital wallet

You look at the culprit very, very sternly.

Or (obligatory): https://xkcd.com/538/

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