The victims getting their money back would defeat the whole purpose of Bitcoin. No one knows who originally owned it.
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent.
Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
Based on current judicial trends, they’ll probably get Coinbase coupons worth 50% of a different coin or something.
Why? Most of them didn't care about bitcoin, they bought it solely to give to the scammer.
After all, if someone stole $1k of gold from someone a decade ago, is giving them (now deflated) $1k USD fair, or is giving them the same physical amount (now worth) $3k in gold fairer? Even if they bought the gold because the scammer asked them too.
The ‘fair enough’ treatment would be to give them the dollar equivalent at the time they gave the bitcoin to the scammer, and the rest goes… to the gov’t? As ‘payment’ for recovering it all and making the payment happen? Or to penalize the scammers? But actually the victims lost a lot of monetary value due to inflation, and lost gains from bitcoin price increasing.
The ‘meh, won’t get anyone run out of town with pitchforks’ is the gov’t seizes the bitcoin, punishes the offenders (how?), and somehow gives warm fuzzies to the victims without actually giving them anything to make their financial pain any better. Aka business as usual. Bonus points if you make them give more money to another party to do it (aka the ‘class action shuffle’ that has gotten popular in the last few decades).
I think that's an important difference. The fair thing is to "make them whole", to restore them to as if they'd never met the scammer. If they had a stash of gold that got stolen, the fair thing is to give them back that gold or the nearest equivalent. If they had a bunch of money that they sent to the scammer, the fair thing is to give them their money back; if they bought $50k in iTunes gift cards to send to the scammer we should be giving them back $50k, not 5,000,000 iTunes points. I don't see how that's any different for Bitcoin.
Sure, and some legal regimes will apply a statutory interest rate to try to make up for that.
* It's not as simple as sending the transaction back to the previous holder
* With some basic detective work the paper trails exist to find many of the victims and verify the amount that was lost.