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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly.

Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)

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What it means, is that the average person doesn't care about Bitcoin, so if you want the article to apply it the average person, you need to denominate the value in something else.

If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.

So if somebody sized a stock portfolio should they mention the number of shares? The market value is in most cases more interesting than the number of coins.

If it's a single stock portfolio yeah. If it's like 1000 different stocks then stick that information into an appendix and only use the current market value in the write-up.

It's like confiscating a Ferrari and saying you took $5 million of car parts from a drug dealer. Like instead say you confiscate 2 Ferraris with a total market value of $5 Million.

Ok but if it was 127 Ferraris I wouldn’t fault them for saying “a large collection of cars worth $500 million”

It says Bitcoin is not a standard denomination. Sort of like if you are in France, and Disney bought Discovery, you would want to know the buying price in euros, not US dollars.

Anecdotally, I would have thrown "127,271 BTC to USD" into Google. I didn't mind it.

It's CNBC. They have to write this for people who know what a bitcoin is worth, people who know a bitcoin is a thing but have no idea what they're worth, and people who've only ever heard the phrase "bitcoin" as a series of noises. But everyone reading cnbc knows what a dollar is.

Agreed. Just like the record price of gold never mentions inflation-adjusted figures, news reporters/editors make the minimum effort, maximum "hype" choices.

Ross Ulbricht had more, at over 144,000⁽¹⁾, with additional 51,000 seized from a hacker⁽²⁾.

[1] https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/22/ross-ulbricht-pardon-b...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h....

It could be more or less meaningful depending on how long the operation has been running, I suppose. That would impact on the integral of the value that was expropriated, as of the time of expropriation.

This is why crypto could never be considered a currency, even the earliest news about BTC (value, theft, pizza purchases, etc) was always reported in USD values.

But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.

No such thing as "crypto". You're intermixing form (BTC Jurisdiction state machine) with particular instance (BTC token, USDC token, whatever fungible or not)

If they mention it by number of BTC then the USD value would be different for every person who read the article, in a few days it might be dramatically different. Who knows?

While the USD value is important, this puts the number in perspective, since only 21M BTC can ever exist (and a good number of them are out of circulation for various reasons).

so many hard drives in so many landfills where we thought "hell, it's only $20 in btc, hardly worth reclaiming"

I'm proud to say that I was able to acquire about $100 worth of product from the dark web using only what would turn out to be several hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin, so at least mine are still in circulation

I cashed out a significant amount a few years ago to help pay for an IVF attempt (sadly, it didn't work out for us, but no regrets). Obviously that amount would represent a large sum today.

On the flip side, when I was packing up our house, I found some old paper wallets that I assumed were empty (from a time when I was doing some experimentation with various scripts). One of them had about $2k in BTC, that I promptly added to our downpayment on our new house.

kinda similar story on my end except instead of finding new BTC I rode the doge pump into tripling my money in about 48 hours and put that down on a house (which was worth even more because I was able to get 2021 mortgage rates instead of having to save until the fed hiked them again)

There's a cool million in some landfill in rural MO, because I did exactly that.

It's funny to imagine how much the one "random act of pizza" I contributed multiple BTC that I mined on my Dell Dimension Pentium machine (worth multiple pennies USD then) is worth now.

This is regular reporting using end-consumer market rates to inflate numbers.

Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.

It is relevant, because the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve hold it in BTC, not in USD.

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