Exactly. They have seized nothing, apparently. The author over at the verge apparently doesnât get it either. The only way this would make any sense is if we were looking at a multi-sig wallet where police has seized one out of two necessary keys, where the second one is a brain wallet or hidden somewhere.
The owner could hold and hope for another fork to happen if it ever does and spend on the fork side.
If they were determined and willing to break the law they'll probably wait to do a crypto swap. Trading BTC for another crypto that is easier to hide behind in the future.
The usual arguments I get is none of this matters because the individual won't be able to spend the crypto into anything of value. Government will monitor the wallet and then monitor any assets, securities, etc the German man has.
Nobody knows what the future will look like though and what happens if any country comes out supporting crypto as their default day to day currency? German man moves, becomes citizen, denounces his German citizenship to not need to report anything and is able to exchange crypto for assets and securities.
For $60M today and what might be +$100M when the time comes I'm sure there will be a path of spending 90%, keeping 10% and living a life of very little worry.
> Who can argue with amazing arguments like "Bitcoin is the
> money of the future because it will allow a fraudster to keep
> the proceeds of his crimes!"
The benefits outweigh the costs. Fiat currency is used for plenty of bad things, like funding wars and proxy wars. It would be a net gain if, for instance, fraudsters were a little more able to steal from gullible people but governments couldn't fight as many wars. Gullibility can, with proper education, be fixed, after all.