Bitcoins Seized by DEA
letstalkbitcoin.com
letstalkbitcoin.com
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[1] Bitcoins can be seized -- just like cash, gold, a file stored in a hard drive, or any other physical or digital asset in a person's possession.
Bitcoin, however, can be used without the use of a third party storing your coins.
Seize that.
I suppose you can file a motion to quash, but now you'll need to submit evidence that you no longer control those Bitcoins. Good luck. Maybe you'll say the passphrase was destroyed. You might be lying, but in any case, they're as good as seized, because if the Bitcoins are ever spent, we'll see it in the blockchain.
And that's all assuming that the loss or destruction of the Bitcoins even matters to the court. Maybe the current USD value of N BTC is just added to your non-dischargeable debt.
Bitcoins raise some interesting legal & law enforcement questions, but it's wrong to assume that they somehow exempt their users from the law, or prevent all enforcement of the law.
People have been trying to bypass the law for millennia, and it rarely works: The law just isn't that fragile.
What you see right now is Law trying to play catch up. However, it seems quite obvious that the people involved in creating Laws don't quite know exactly what Bitcoin is fully. We'll see a bunch of really dumb bills being introduced in retaliation then, like always, they will adapt slowly and find a way to take control.
Bitcoin isn't exempt, you're right. Though, Bitcoin can be changed or something new will come out.
The US Government's response so far has been pretty good, actually. They're not making new rules for bitcoin. They're making it explicitly known that they're treating BTC like all other forms of money.
During the "raid" (I.E. your desperate attempt to set fire to your own property to destroy evidence), this password was lost.
The court can't force you to hand over something you no longer have. Of course, the court also can't give you a polygraph test since it isn't admissible as evidence anyway.
If the Bitcoins do get spent sometime later, you could argue someone likely bruteforced the passphrase (it was only 12 characters long). That's still reasonable doubt.
Edit: After reading my own post, I'm quite terrified of my own imagination. I think you're a bad influence on me :(
Good luck arguing that that a password with 78-bit entropy (12 characters out of 95 in the ASCII set) was likely broken by brute force. 'Reasonable doubt' does not mean 'no matter how improbable,' otherwise nobody would ever get convicted.
Meanwhile, people have been convicted with far more implausible evidence (eyewitness testimony comes to mind) so this will be the least of your worries.
Wow. You've certainly persuaded me.
>'Reasonable doubt' does not mean 'no matter how improbable,'
It's times like this I genuinely wish HN had an "ignore" feature since I don't believe in down votes.
[citation needed]
There are many reasons to want to use Bitcoin.
Plus it is much more seizure resistant than centralized systems like banks.
Yeah, the more I read about bitcoin in the media, the more I've decided people are projecting on the currency what they want it to be about.
The entire point of Bitcoin is anonymity!
The entire point of Bitcoin is to be able to do things that sound suspiciously like laundering money!
The entire point of Bitcoin is to circumvent seizure!
I just wonder what will be next on the list.
Every transaction in BTC is recorded in the public blockchain _forever_. A good enough computer has infinite amounts of time to analyze the transactions of BTCs after the fact.
I dare say it is impossible to properly launder money with BTCs as it is. (ZeroCoins or other protocol extensions notwithstanding)
This assumes that you accept the premise that a government should be able to steal property, simply because it doesn't like certain kinds of transactions.
That said, I'm not a fan of the general blanket seizure laws associated with the WoD.
This assumes that you accept the premise that a government should be able to steal property, simply because it doesn't like certain kinds of transactions.
Do you think people should be able to profit from crime?
On the other hand, if I actually do injure someone, then that person could lay a claim against me. They are the ones entitled to any property of mine at that point, as compensation, not the State.
Sure, and much of the drug trade should be legal in my opinion. However it's not and the confiscation of funds from criminal activity is commonplace and (IMHO) a good thing.
I disagree with the government about what should be criminal, but not on stripping criminals of their profit, and I think there are circumstances where people exchange products or services, without coercion or other people directly harmed, that should be still be illegal and any profits confiscated.
As an extreme example, trade in radioactive material like uranium.
Never let it be said you don't dream big!
I'm not sure you fit into the real world any more than a socialist utopian does, but hey, good for you for having faith in humanity....
That said I agree, this is not the government "stealing" because it's the proceeds of crime and subject to forfeit. The way to tackle the WoD is not just by hiding money and enabling drug dealers.
I certainly understand current laws and how they are enforced. I simply reject them.
Do you think that your own position is somehow not a philosophical position of some kind? We all have a similar obligation to either defend or not defend our positions. If your "side" happens to be the one in control, all the more reason to justify it, unless you prefer coercion and force to do so.
If you wish to enforce your own view of how things should be on everyone else without using the political process, you run the risk of being a greater tyranny than what you seek to replace.
Not really. You can use services that just broadcast transactions. Blockchain.info has a service to do this, I'm sure there are a few other that exists.
https://blockchain.info/tx/ec3c6440a5302eade99c3be3dbe475243...
I will say that many people simply don't think in terms of idealism, at least not to the extent they'd allow it to impact major life decisions.
And many who are idealistic would still feel they can "change the world" more effectively outside the government than within...
However, some - maybe most - of those people work all day long to impede the effectiveness of others. And that's in the best governments.
I agree that we shouldn't assume that government workers are hacks.
But I think you can fairly label almost any government "stupid," when you consider how it behaves as an entity, regardless of the mixture of the people that act as its cells.
I'll step out on a limb and say that given their annual budget of almost $3B, they have a technology person or 2 on staff.
Imagine a system where the private material of a wallet is shared among one or more trusted individuals (using secret sharing) who are under instructions to cooperate with each other in destroying or moving the money if you are ever arrested or fail to check in after a certain period of time. If your aim is to merely destroy the money, you could also get away with having a secret VPS running somewhere that does the deed (it would not matter if it were later found).
If you go with the "destroy" route, then you would not even be destroying the evidence from an ethics standpoint (thanks to the nature of the blockchain). However the authorities, upon being denied their "prize", would undoubtedly throw a childish hissyfit and assert that you destroyed the evidence anyway.
Sounds like burying your cash on an island. I think you might be able to publish an exciting novel about this...
Don't you think that people involved in money-laundering already engage in such conspiracies? There's a reason they call it 'organized crime.'
I'm not sure what you are getting at here.
You seem to be entirely misunderstanding what I am proposing.
You seem to be under the impression that I think the authorities would not realize what happened, or would not strike out at you for doing it. I am suggesting neither of those things. They can be as angry as they want to be, but that will not un-transfer those bitcoins. Hell, they can beat you with a wrench for the rest of your natural life but that will not get the bitcoins back.
You plainly do not understand what I am suggesting. "That would be organized crime and authorities are good at recognizing organized crime" is not a coherent response. Speak plainly, what specifically do you think the flaw is?
You're so obsessed with getting one over on the government that you've adopted the position of the dog in the manger; if you can't have it, nobody else will, ha-ha-ha!
They can be as angry as they want to be, but that will not un-transfer those bitcoins.
I feel like I'm talking to a 12 year old. Your entire position is predicated on the fallacious belief that government's primary goal is to get its hands on your property. You're in the grip of an ideological delusion. If anything, your scheme is going to widen the government's reach by exapnding the number of prosecutable individuals.
That's very comforting.
Governments are used to having a stick to support their arguments with; take it away, and you will find them very bad at making an argument.
Petty revenge is the bread and butter of lesser bureaucrats in government.
In other words, is there some sort of digital central bank that controls inflation by deciding how many Bitcoins are released per area?
One would think that the leading figures of these pools know each other. One would think it's outside the realm of conspiracy to think that the designers of Bitcoin expected the mining pools to emerge once difficulty had grown sufficiently large.
No it is not outside the realm of possibility that people could conspire to perform a double spending attack, you are completely right. What you have to consider, however, it is not very likely that people conspire to undermine their own economic interest. That doesn't happen very often in this world, it is not in our nature (but it is a possibility).
There are much cheaper and easier attacks that could be pulled off right now by a single attacker, lower hanging fruit (like flooding the network with transactions with above average fees, this will effectively block most other transactions for as long as the attacker can afford).
If a double spending attack was to occur at the mining pool level, you wouldn't even need to have a conspiracy to make it possible, just a single large pool operator with a period of extraordinary luck would be able to get 6 blocks in a row (it has happened before, it will happen again).
If pool operators conspire to double spend or change the protocol there will be a mass exodus of individual miners from the pools.
Bitcoiners are savvy enough to get raised eyebrows if a major pool started encouraging and/or requiring users to use a proprietary, closed mining software that may attempt to modify the bitcoin network's behavior to do something unsavory.
Yeah, this sounds like exactly the sort of thing that people would do.
The behavior of clients does influence fees, but consumers using Bitcoin will happily switch to the client that lets them pay the fee they want to pay (talking about the excess fee not the fee described in https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees .)
Policy by economic (mining) majority could be an issue in the future when the policy directly determines the profits of that majority.
Also, as hardware gets more specialized, the cost to entry gets higher and power concentrates.
As more BTC are mined, the difficulty of finding new ones increases and the reward decreases. Once the difficulty goes up, only those hashes that begin with 8 zeroes will be considered valid, so it will take twice as much effort to find a valid one. Currently, a successful block nets 25 BTC to the miner, down from 50 a while back. Soon, it will drop to 12.5 BTC.
Bitcoin is, by design, deflationary. All other things being equal, the value of a Bitcoin will continue to rise as the pool of unmined coins shrinks. There is no central authority, rather inherent scarcity and the effort required to mine the coins gives value. The exchange rate of BTC -> fiat is determined by the market, operating on exchanges such as Mt Gox. There is no mechanism for anything outside of market effects to alter the price or availability of Bitcoin.
No, they have a very carefully controlled (and diminishing) inflation of the money supply.
With a fixed total amount and no magic bullet to wean us off our addiction to growth. It's deflationary by design.
Very meaningful difference here.