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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?

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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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