1. The feds can't take your money.
2. Once your money's gone, it's gone.
If criminals can't count on #1 holding true, and their victims can't count on #2 holding true, what is even the point of it?
It's not even new - Bitcoin right from the start was explicitly created to replace a centralized system used by criminals to evade currency controls. Bitcoin's creator(s?) saw that the various governments were eventually able to shut that down and set up Bitcoin as a decentralized system to avoid that problem.
It's not a flaw in crypto that criminals flock to it - it is built into the very design. This story shows that it is not perfect but to criminals it is the best that they have.
There's no thing that the feds can't have because they have an infinite amount of sanctions violence and tools at their disposal to make anyone do what they want, one way or another.
>were previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession. Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
More information as the mystery deepens, it's not proceeds from just the pig butchering
https://www.elliptic.co/blog/15-billion-us-seizure-reveals-p...