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Comment by JamesianP | Hacker News Reader

The Bahamas has a total population of a smallish city and surely a national budget to match. Grabbing 500M anonymously (while letting everyone run around for days thinking it was a hacker) doesn't make much sense either. Did they put their entire country's budget on the exchange or something?

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When exchanges registered in the Bahamas are in danger of losing customers money, Bahamian government has authority and duty to seize assets to protect customers. Bahamian government is taking custody, it's not their money.

I'm not so sure. Is it correct that the Bahamian government prompty converted all the seized tokens to ETH? If the seizure was for purposes of "safekeeping", what gives the Bahamians the right to trade in other people's cryptographic tokens?

This is conjecture on conjecture, but generally if you're holding assets in trust you can sell/trade them if it would be in the beneficiaries' best interests.

"Holding assets in trust" Does that apply to assets that were seized? To me, the phrase "in trust" implies that the owner of the assets has entrusted them to you, and you have a fiduciary duty to them.

[I'm uncomfortable referring to cryptographic tokens as "assets". I think of an asset as something with an intrinsic value, albeit floating. Cryptographic tokens have a price, but no value.]

Apparently, FTX is registered not in the Bahamas but in Antigua and Barbuda. I learned that recently as well.

And also has legal entities in the Bahamas. Plus, SBF is their himself, so the legal HQ, where decisions are made (an important factor in corporate and tax law) is to an extent yet to be determined by the various courts, the Bahamas.

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