Hacker News Reader

It's not 2B that the german government gets. It is 50k bitcoin. If the price (value) of bitcoin has increased in the last few years, that's nice but does not really matter. The price could as easily have dropped.

If you reeplace bitcoin by "famous painting" or "lucery sports car" it might make more sense

View on HN

> They are said to have purchased Bitcoins with the proceeds

Based on this, I'd assume the illegal proceeds are fiat currency based, hence they could sell the full bitcoin amount, return _all_ illegal profits, fines,etc and still have plenty left

Likewise, if they bought crypto/stocks/business but the valuation went down, they'd be liable to pay the "illegal proceeds" amount, not the value of the business which may have declined significantly in the meantime?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com