On the one hand it's all "blood money" / tainted, but the actual proceeds at the time of the crime have a specific value.
It sounds like the police tripped a loophole in law by liquidating some of the BTC. Sounds like if the police had HODL'd they'd have been fine defending it as just look, these were the assets he had, we seized them. But since they liquidated, the defense got to say, hey, you already got the full proceeds.
From the article - "The lesson to be learned from this is to keep the value in bitcoin, that the profit from the crime should be 36 bitcoin, regardless of what value the bitcoin has at the time".
> "It has led to consequences I was not able to foresee at the time."
> "I think we should probably invest in an internal education in the [prosecution] authority, as cryptocurrency will be a factor we'll be dealing with to a much greater extent than we are today. The more we increase the level of knowledge within the organization, the fewer mistakes we will make."
I'm not familiar with the swedish legal system (and not a lawyer), but often you can only be convicted for things the prosecution requests/accuses you of. Otherwise you can't defend yourself in court.
So the prosecution ordered the bitcoin to be seized as proceeds of the crime, but not in a correct way, so the court ruling contained the same wording that a specific value in swedish Kronen shall be seized. Had the prosecution demanded the seizure in terms of Bitcoin instead, the court would probably have approved it too. However, at this point it's too late to change the ruling. Courts exist to settle things, and one can't simply re-roll a prosecution case unless there were grave mistakes.
One interesting consequence is that the drug dealer would have had to pay the difference if bitcoin had dropped in value instead of rising.
In Florida (and many other states) it was/is common practice that any excuse police made could be used to seize almost any of a person's property, essentially on the spot. Generally without even needing to arrest the person or charge them with a crime or get a warrant. Just based on "suspicion" on the cops behalf.
Thank good Ole "rule of law" President Reagan and the war on drugs for that one. See:
- https://cplaw-miami.com/police-seize-your-property-without-a... - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/1/16686014/p... - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Crime_Control_...
It's fine, the dog jumped at the window of your stopped car.
Otherwise, you'd have to pay for the loss in value of a seized car if it's sold only years later or the loss in value of gold bars seized if the market on those crashed in the meantime.
Another possibility is that this really only arises as a result of the fact that the drug dealer received payment in bitcoin whereas it's less likely a drug dealer would be paid in gold or cars.
The state seized X $ of assets from you and notes as such. After 6 months, they finally get to auction it off, it is now worth X + Y $. Since the state seized X $ of assets, they ought to give back the Y $. They got what they wanted as they have seized X $ not X + Y $.
If the assets are now worth X - Y $ (Y <= X) then nothing happens, as the state has seized the amount X from you already. They got what they wanted back then and that it is worth less is not your fault.
A guess at why it's like that would be - people flow value of drugs/illicit goods, rarely holding the value for long. This means the prosecutor wants to set an amount for "all drug deals they can convict for" and then try to seize that value.
Clearly before crypto the only thing that would wildly fluctuate vs the country's currency is stocks. No one's doing drug deals in stocks so the law was written in value. If they did seize things like stocks it's clear they had a process to sell the liquid asset (they tried to sell the BTC), but they couldn't get their ducks in order to sell it, haha.
I'm sure there's going to be a change to the law to seize the asset as a whole instead of pegging it to some particular value.
I assume under this approach the authorities would have claimed the full amount you started with and not what you were now left with. Crypto just happens to have been a casino where people have been winning.
The house is then auctioned off. It's not valued at the time of arrest and any additional value returned to the person arrested.
I don't understand why it could, or should, be any different for electronic stores of value (stock, options, crypto).
As I understand this article, the same would have happened if the legal paperwork listed the value of the house in crowns, and then the housing market rose and the house tripled in value.
The only unusual thing with Bitcoins, is that the value thereof has risen to quite extreme proportions.
> what proceeds should be stripped if you get cash in exchange for drugs and use that cash to buy GME calls which skyrocket?
> but the actual proceeds at the time of the crime have a specific value
The specific value at the time is, in nearly every other situation, irrelevant. The mistake was putting a claim to a monetary value of *asset* rather than the *asset* itself.
People have been saying they have their own nexus currencies for the whole last decade, and others spent too much time ignoring that in. Now it bit Sweden in the ass, for now.
So unlike buying a house or buying stock options, the argument can be made that the crypto is itself the medium of exchange and therefore the value in fiat is irrelevant.
But this also means that if the crypto drops in price while the cops are HODLing it, they lose out.
my question is whether we should consider these crypto clean, or whether we should stop trying to determine if crypto provenance is clean or not as it doesn't seem possible to rely on the due process of every municipality worldwide, unless the state is deemed as the crypto washer - magically cleaning all crypto as it temporarily seizes and auctions them or returns them - in which case a state will take advantage of that