Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gamblor956 1989 days ago
Can the government seize Bitcoin directly? No.

Yes, it can. The U.S. government has in fact seized Bitcoin directly and sold it at auction several times. It is arguably the single largest non-exchange seller of Bitcoin in Bitcoin's history.

1 comments

It can only be taken in these events:

1) Seed phrases are discovered (ie. plaintext document or physical artifact).

2) Seed phrases are handed over by willing party.

If #1 doesn't exist, then #2 is the only option.

This is the same as with cash money.

Money can only be seized if the safe is found. And the combination is handed over by a willing party.

The difference is that money is actually more secure because you don't have a public ledger telling you that it exists and who owns it and how much of it they own as you do with the public cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Cash needs to be accessible to be useful.

Crypto is magnitudes more accessible. I can travel to any country in the world with an encrypted usb drive of my seed words, and no one is wiser. OR even upload a file to the internet and forego carrying anything at all. A government can try to censor transactions belonging to an address, but we don't have good precedent to see how the network will behave. Miners in other jurisdictions have no reason to follow someone else's censorship.