How much BTC has US government seized, and what does it do with it?
To date, it has auctioned off 185,000 BTC.
After the coins are sold, the cash is then distributed to different government departments. It often goes into the Treasury Forfeiture Fund or the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund.
Wait that’s not the interesting part, interesting part is yet to come.
they’re slowly learning that much of this is unnecessary because Bitcoin was designed in such a way that wallets can be frozen, and funds can be moved by court order. In other words, code is not law, law is law.
To imagine how this might work in the future, let’s imagine that Ulbricht’s Silk Road was still active today. If authorities could prove that wallets x, y, and z belonged to Silk Road, say by using blockchain analytics tools combined with traditional investigation techniques, they could secure court orders from judges that issue the orders to miners/nodes and have them simply freeze the funds. Later, a court could order the miners/nodes to move the funds from the Silk Road wallets to the wallets of the receiving agency.
Only if it was that simple.
Yes code is not the law but “open source” code is the law.
Full article here
https://coingeek.com/how-much-btc-has-us-government-seized-and-what-does-it-do-with-it/