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.