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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

This is only tangentially related to the headline, but do you think divorce courts in the future will grant divorcing spouses half of their partner's cryptocurrency holdings? Certainly, if someone were to transfer the bulk of their investments into crypto to avoid sharing, that's an evasion mechanism the courts would be interested in countering.

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This is already the case. I mean you can't hide your cash by buying houses or yachts or shares in a company. So crypto is no different - it's an asset owned by you.

If the courts don't know about the crypto that's another thing, but that's just the same as moving your money into an offshore account and not telling anyone. It's physically possible, but isn't legal as a way to get out of paying what you owe.

This will be very interesting (but likely not). People have tried to hide assets from tax authorities, spouses, creditors, etc for thousands of years.

I'm a little surprised (or not) at the naivete of the cryptocurrency community "It's digital" "It's anonymous" "It can't be seized or controlled by the government". Sure, as though these extremely experienced professionals and very powerful institutions are going to read a tweet from one of the crypto maxis and just throw their hands up and say "It's on the internet, I guess there's nothing we can do about it".

These groups are very, very good at what they do. They've seen it all and even if it's XMR (or whatever) with the proper motivation they will find it (and you). Very, very few people and organizations have the full skill set required to evade these authorities.

Fwiw, the FBI couldn't recover the XMR it paid as part of entrapping a Navy nuke officer who was leaking sub secrets. Source is the indictment.

Even before crypto "if you're good you're good". People have always gotten away with these things. It's just usually because they either didn't make a mistake (very rare) or the authorities didn't care enough (very common).

One would think the FBI counterintel team chasing international nuke sub secrets sales would be in the "if you're good you're good" bucket, but who knows. the raw indictment for that case is worth a read if you're interested in this space.

I'm referring to the skill (luck?) of the criminal. Yes, every once in a while there's going to be the "perfect murder", the "perfect heist", etc.

I read the indictment. They were arrested and charged. We'll see how the defense plays out but from a read of the indictment they made plenty of mistakes and will (likely) end up going to prison given the conviction/plea rate of federal prosecutors.

Once convicted a federal judge can order them to give up the monero (as I said in my original comment). On top of their time in sentencing for the original crime they can be held indefinitely until they comply with the court order.

In the end they'll go to prison and the government will squeeze them for whatever they can get.

Yes, but new technology makes it easier. Think of all the logistics associated with burying $10,000 in a hole in the ground and the skills you need to do it properly, and compare to the relative ease of acquiring and stashing $10,000 in cryptocurrency.

The New York Times just ran a story about this very issue - "Divorcing Couples Fight Over the Kids, the House and Now the Crypto". [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/technology/divorce-bitcoi...

Cryptocurrencies are just an asset, they are divided up like any other asset in a divorce.

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