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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. $2.3 million dollars of BTC isn't too much.

It’s not, but it sets the precedent that the FBI will seize bitcoin without any kind of due process when it is able to recover proceeds from a criminal transaction .

This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.

So it’s easy to see why its value went down — fewer criminals will want to use it.

I'm still doubtful the things are causally correlated. Wouldn't privacy coins then increase in price immediately as well?

>This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.

Do criminals seriously expect that bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is safe against the wallet being hacked? Hardware/cold wallets have been around for years, so this is more of an opsec issue than a technology issue.

It's a lot harder than tracing cashout after a SWIFT transfer.

Hell yeah they will, honestly it's about time we did some more aggressive offensive security operations.

But what does crypto have to do with criminals? Criminals just need to up their op sec game, they know that. BTC dropping is only related insofar as this stupid correlation is getting pushed hard in the media right now.

> But what does crypto have to do with criminals?

Criminals are basically the only group making widespread use of Bitcoin as a currency rather than as an asset class.

I don't know enough to dispute that, but I am fairly skeptical that's true.

Who is buying stuff directly with Bitcoin? Companies buying out of ransomware, and maybe some HODLers buying Teslas.

Yeah, and it makes it even easier to do legally because nobody owns the network.

A possible causal factor is that much of the crypto world actually thinks BTC is private. It's not. It's the opposite: a 100% public fully replicated ledger.

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