
Criminal Assets Bureau seizes 6k bitcoin, sale impossible without access codes - edward
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/drug-dealer-loses-codes-for-53-6m-bitcoin-accounts-1.4180182
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rdiddly
That's okay because asset forfeiture is about denying the convicted party
access to the fruits of their crimes, and not about the incredibly conflict-
of-interest-riddled idea that the state should be able to plunder those assets
and profit from it... riiiight??

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bowmessage
How is access denied if the private keys remain unchanged?

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malux85
Because he's lost the keys - without the private keys, how will anyone access
the funds?

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psychlops
In no real justice system could selling backyard weed justify the seizure of
sixty million dollars.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
How do you earn that much on "backyard" anything?

~~~
serf
interest accrued on otherwise nefarious activity.

esoteric philosophical questions : if the base money that accrues interest is
of 'immoral' origin, is the interest still 'immoral'? Is the act of saving
money an action that has a base 'moral' precept? If it's a positive action,
does that make the interest less 'immoral' than the money used to make it?
What if the interest feeds a 'moral' charity?

Just stuff I think about with regards to finance, not that morality matters
much practically in the real world.

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jacques_chester
There are extensive bodies of law that deal with these topics, especially in
Trusts law.

Happily I quit law school before getting any good at them.

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bowmessage
No doubt there are other copies of those codes, but now Collins has plausible
deniability :)

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jacques_chester
If they know the wallet address, any movements will be a giant neon sign
screaming "hey, arrest me again!"

~~~
bowmessage
I mean, that would make for an interesting legal case. I feel that you could
try and argue though that some Bitcoin 0-day was used to move the funds and
retain your deniability...

Even the officers hope this happens one day (! good luck to them, if the tech
existed the coins would be immediately worthless...)

"... officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day
enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold."

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jacques_chester
Doubling down on perjury as a legal tactic is unwise.

I think it would only be interesting in that folks who think crypto is
magically law-proof would discover that no, it's not. Not at all.

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FDSGSG
>Doubling down on perjury as a legal tactic is unwise.

This is Ireland we're talking about. Not the US.

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grawprog
Poor timing I guess.

[https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/perjury-to-be-
made-...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/perjury-to-be-made-easier-
to-prosecute-under-new-law-1.3928733)

~~~
FDSGSG
The obvious solution would just be to not say anything at all. For perjury to
be on the cards here there'd have to be some next level stupidity involved.

Although, claiming that someone else _could 've_ done something isn't
necessarily untruthful even if you did that thing yourself.

Are defendants even sworn in in Ireland? If not, a successful perjury
prosecution seems rather unlikely
[https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2018/112/eng/v...](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2018/112/eng/ver_b/b112b18s.pdf)

I really can't imagine why the guy running away with the bitcoin would ever be
compelled to testify under oath.

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BubRoss
If they don't have the private keys and use them to move the balance to
addresses that only they control, they didn't really seize anything.

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est31
The way I see it is that you can seize a car, airplane or ship without having
keys for it. What's important is that the government considers those bitcoins
as its property. So if anyone in the future is moving BTC from those
addresses, they are infringing upon government property like someone who stole
a police car. The government might even auction that right off, although the
fact that they don't have immediate access probably reduces the value by a
large amount.

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sickygnar
It's like they don't know where the car is, only which it is, and put the vin
in some stolen car database.

Bitcoin seems so terrible privacy wise. It's so much more traceable than cash.
I don't know why people don't just use monero. That'd be like everyone on the
planet drives the same car, and the only way to identify yours would be to
have the keys to it. The analogy works because monero takes a long time to
identify yours with your key - you have to check every "car". That's one of
the major technological downsides to it unfortunately.

~~~
three_seagrass
Bitcoin is ridiculously anti-privacy. The public ledger of every single
transaction throughout history coupled with everyone knowing exactly how much
funds you have in your wallet is kind of absurd from a consumer standpoint.

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seibelj
Wow this whole story is a lie. The cops actually thought they “seized” the
accounts because they knew the addresses, but never had the private keys! What
a disaster

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TwoBit
Is there any actual way to "seize" a bitcoin collection without knowing the
master key(s)?

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alanfalcon
You can blacklist certain addresses with certain law abiding exchanges, which
is more like marked bills than a seizure. What happened here was obviously not
a seizure, you’d need the private key(s) AND to have actually moved the
bitcoin to a new secure wallet under your control before you could consider
them seized.

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RL_Quine
You can't really. There's nothing stopping people from just moving them
somewhere else, and then the ownership is anonymous again. If you blacklist
all of the destinations, what if they send 0.00000001 to every single known
exchange, are all of those addresses now on the blacklist? Of course not, this
sort of thing is just nonsensical with an understanding of the system.

~~~
three_seagrass
Of course you can. The regulated exchanges would (best case) just
automatically remove the 0.00000001 BTC from the receiving wallet, or (worst
case) freeze out the entire wallet indefinitely, while they send it back on
the next block.

The regulated exhcanges have multiple forms of identification too so the
recipient is screwed even if they manage to move it all before that happens.

~~~
RL_Quine
What if the payment is made to their wallet? Do they "freeze" their own
wallet?

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three_seagrass
The exchanges' wallet? In this hypothetical probably not, since the freeze is
to prevent bad actors from siphoning the funds back out of the wallet, and the
exchange isn't going to do that to itself.

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ur-whale
While they'd heard it mentioned before, Criminal Assets Bureau discovers what
"Bitcoin is unconfiscatable" actually means.

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drcode
In other news:

\- Seattle woman wins Kentucky Derby without having a horse

\- Chicago man wins lottery without having winning numbers

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intpbro
Ouch

