Canadian Court Freezes Millions in Convoy Protestor Funds–Including Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Canadian Court Freezes Millions in Convoy Protestor Funds–Including Bitcoin

decrypt.co

6 pointsGBiT9 comments

Well at least it was a court. Are there reports of non-judicial entities doing freezing without a court order?

how do you freeze bitcoin? They can prevent me from putting transaction in the blockchain using my full node at home ? Or they just make it illegal for me to do it?

They would probably move it into a custodial wallet.

They can't. All they can do is prevent off-ramping from exchanges. If you hold your private keys, you can transact on the Bitcoin network with whoever you want, whenever you want.

This court order are sent to exchanges and some wallet providers... One of the major exchanges Kraken CEO told, that they have to comply to orders like this right now... It would be interesting and I think in future we definitely will see such event, then court order will tell miner to forbid transacting from some addresses. It would be interesting to see reaction to such order.

oh this make sense now. they basically force all exchange in there jurisdiction to not let people send money to this particular wallet.

But you can still transfer money to a cold wallet you own and then use the cold wallet to send money yourself to a wallet that is in the blacklist.

Custody services and trading platforms are subject to courts. Cold wallets and trading peer-to-peer only gets you so far.

People keep forgetting that we live in a society. If you create a terrorist organization for example and people send you money without the involvement of banks the government won't just roll over for you. The courts can order the seizure of your assets, and you can be charged with obstruction of justice.

while i agree with you, wouldn’t the justice system first have to prove i am the owner of the bitcoin cold wallet before seizing my other asset. Also what if I lost the password to my wallet an no one can move the fund out of it, they will seize other asset because they pretend I could still use the bitcoin in the account ?

Cryptocurrencies are taxed in most countries, but many people don't report their capital gains from them properly on their tax returns. It's however when you start participating in the economy, including cashing out is where they can get you and governments are increasingly tracking and taxing crypto transactions. Everyone participating is expected to self-report.

Generally standing between the government and it's tax money is unhealthy, unless you are wealthy.

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