Bitcoin is the single largest coordination of encryption in history, and this delivers a store of value which cannot be seized. This has incredible value to those who already utilize offshore banking havens and complex legal coordination mechanisms to protect their wealth. Within a growing number of use cases, bitcoin via the lightning network provides access to financial services to the unbanked who are able to also establish their self soverign identity. To those individuals these edge cases are incredibly valuable.
Police can absolutely seize the physical artifacts on which your wallet resides. And if that storage is encrypted, consider https://www.xkcd.com/538/ - You may not be able to seize the bitcoins, but you can absolutely seize the person owning them.
>Police can absolutely seize the physical artifacts on which your wallet resides.
They have to find it first, which can be easy or difficult, depending on how motivated you are to make it difficult. You can quite easily make it more difficult than it is for them to walk into a bank and say “freeze this account”.
Yeah, but if they can't get to it before you are aware of what's going on (as is the case with most asset seizures) then you can deal with the situation first. For example, a judge issues an order for you to turn over the private keys, and jails you until you decide to comply. Someone you trust that has access to the private keys transfers funds out of that wallet, then you turn over the private key. You have complied with the order to turn over the keys, and you have deniability ("someone must have seen news of my arrest in the press and broken into my storage shed...the one you guys didn't check...where the keys were stored!").
And private citizens don’t like it when judges order their money to be taken without warning or consent. I was just saying that crypto gives people options that might enable them to maintain more control over the situation than they would have if their money is just sitting in a bank.
Certainly the police seize property citing dubious reasons, but are there examples of judges seizing financial assets without legal authority to do so?
Police can use civil forfeiture to seize property; but can't use civil forfeiture laws to compel you to give up your gmail password. That requires a court order/warrant. Hence the original comment about a judge could compel you into turning over your BTC Wallet.
Whether the reason is valid or not doesn’t matter much to the target of such an order. They still lose access to their funds. People who care about that possibility may want to take steps to make it more difficult for someone to do this to them. That’s all I was saying.
As a practical matter, you get held in contempt of court until you decrypt stuff, and God help you if you're in the UK where they can hold people if they have a suspicion that you're hiding something.
> That is fundamentally unenforceable...as much as ordering someone to turn over cash.
Defying the courts authority is Contempt of Court. If you fail to comply with a judges order, that can lead to incarceration. Continue to defy, can lead to criminal incarceration.
Honestly not sure why you're being downvoted here. Your point seems reasonable and true based on how easy it is to create a paper wallet and make that paper sheet all but unfindable.
Reading this sounds like a cult. Outside of politics, I don't think I've experienced so much groupthink and unreasoned responses as I have w.r.t Bitcoin.
And it seems like anytime it's challenged or perceived as threatened it's almost a copy paste of the exact same content as above completely ignoring the original poster's comments.
Crypto or distributed banking may be a useful concept, but Bitcoin is horrible to the world. Energy is one of the single most important and fundamental resources. To get really theoretical this hold from the cellular level all the way up to societal. We are burning and trashing a significant portuon of society's energy to run a simplistic financial network. And this percentage will only grow, and it's built into the system that it must be wasted.
Bitcoin is our first planet level grey goo, and we're somehow still arguing about it. 30% of our planet's energy cannot go to running a simple financial network, it's ludicrous.
Other than governments stepping in and banning it, what will prevent that?
