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Comment by yarky | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone understand the legal logic behind such a risky decision? I mean, if they confiscate an asset, why wouldn't they just hold onto it until the legal process is settled?

If it was a car that they confiscated, would they still have the car or would they also need to buy the car today? I am honestly curious as to how this makes any legal sense.

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Reading the story, it appears that the bitcoins were held by the police and only recently were some sold for cash.

"But by the time the Swedish Enforcement Authority began auctioning off the crypto, bitcoin had skyrocketed in value — and only three had to be sold to amount to the value that was booked as the dealer’s profit at the time of his arrest."

If the police confiscated everything you owned to cover a fine for $100, isn't it reasonable to get the difference back?

>If the police confiscated everything you owned to cover a fine for $100, isn't it reasonable to get the difference back?

Legally this is correct and exactly what happened.

The reason this is becoming an issue is that all the bitcoins that were seized were from selling drugs. The point of the fine is to match the profit of the crime so reasonably it should have taken all of the bitcoin regardless of the underlying value.

If he had sold drugs for a gold ring and then the price of gold went up, should he have gotten a bit of the ring back?

It's not clear from the article that the drug dealer sold drugs for bitcoins. It seems a little more likely that he converted money into bitcoins, and the authorities didn't know how to trace the proceeds through a fungible asset. This is literally the definition of money laundering.

Swedish sources do state that the bitcoin came from selling drugs.

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/domda-knarklangare-far-mang...

I don't read Swedish, but the Google translation says, "the police managed to secure 36 bitcoins which, according to the chamber prosecutor, come from the men's drug sales."

That seems to be an assertion the prosecutor made, but I see no facts to support that statement. Prosecutors say those sorts of things all the time in order to win cases.

Are you saying the prosecutor is correct or that the translation is false?

Since the court ordered the dealer to pay the equivalent of 36 bitcoins I'm assuming that the court found it well enough established that the bitcoin came from the drug sales.

Thank you! I got it wrong because of the negativity of the article. They seem mad because they missed an opportunity to make 1.6M then.

> They seem mad because they missed an opportunity to make 1.6M then.

I think it's more that they're mad because someone managed to make and keep 7 figures profit from a crime that they were caught doing purely because the justice system screwed up.

It's hard to keep the "crime doesn't pay" messaging when stuff like that happens.

You're welcome! I know what you mean, though. It's like everyone, even a law enforcement officer, thinks it's okay to scam others, even a drug dealer.

Yeah this seems weird. If the price of bitcoin had gone down, would he owe the government extra money?

Yes. It makes sense if you think of it as debt - he had a debt of $137000 and they had seized assets to cover the debt. The assets covered more than the debt so the remainder was paid back. If the assets hadn't covered the debt he would have had to cover it separately.

But why would it be a debt? They stripped him of the proceeds of the drug deals: 36 bitcoins. Why is the cash value of those bitcoins at the time of seizure relevant? If they had seized his car, and it depreciated between when they seized and auctioned it, does he owe them the difference too? Why should the legal system treat seized assets as equivalent monetary value debts?

It's a debt because the way the legal system carried out stripping him of his earnings was to give him a fine equal to the value of the BTC at the time. This was of course a mistake which is why this whole thing blew up, but in practice that's how it was handled.

It seems wrong to both seize the assets and then also force the defendant to pay a debt from those assets. If bitcoin goes down then they would be on the hook for a massive amount of money that they don't have. I doubt the defendant would be able to tell the prosecutors to sell the assets if, say, bitcoin crashed last year.

Absolutely, but it also seems wrong that assets gained through criminal activities are now being paid out completely clean to the convicted criminal. As the prosecutor is quoted saying in the article it's a mistake to convert a variable value asset into a fixed price, especially when Swedish government inefficiency leads to the asset being liquidated 2 years later.

> it also seems wrong that assets gained through criminal activities are now being paid out completely clean to the convicted criminal.

That's the key indeed. I think I get it now! Anyway, the simple thing would be counting btc if btc is confiscated and counting cars if cars are confiscated. Then I don't see how it could blow up, but I guess it just can't be that simple.

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