DurwinSomeone crashed the entire Onion market in America, made millions, walked away scott-free and starte…
We learnt that perfect monopoly can cause catastrophic damage to any economy, even the onion market.A tiny man who rocked America with Onions History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. You want to learn something, anything? Look back in history and it will surprise you just how eerily relevant it can be even in modern times. With the advent of Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Tech titans and startups, you get all sorts of happenings like Tulip Mania, recessions, Feds stepping in, market manipulations a...
DurwinBurger King gave candy to a worker has worked for more than 20 years.
The Whopper, which was first introduced in 1957, was a quarter-pound, oversized burger on a vast five-inch bun that cost a reasonable 29 cents.Large corporations can be cruel and uncaring. They often claim to care about their employees, but sometimes the reality can be quite different. This is the story of Kevin Ford, a cook and cashier at Burger King who had worked tirelessly for over two decades. To celebrate his remarkable feat of never taking a sick day, Burger King decided to shower him ...
DurwinThe youngest self-made billionaire just bought Forbes.
Austin Russell is an American entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies. Luminar specializes in lidar and machine perception technologies, mainly used in autonomous cars. Luminar went public in December 2020, making him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 25.Wha’s up with billionaires and news media? In a stunning turn of events, Austin Russell, the youngest self-made billionaire of 2021, has made headlines once again by acquiring a majority stake in Forbes ma...
CEO of StartupX | DeFi, NFT, Crypto, Web3.0 Builder | Co-Founder at IxSA | Director of Startup Weekend Singapore | Sustainability Champion
DurwinSomeone crashed the entire Onion market in America, made millions, walked away scott-free and starte…
We learnt that perfect monopoly can cause catastrophic damage to any economy, even the onion market.A tiny man who rocked America with Onions History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. You want to learn something, anything? Look back in history and it will surprise you just how eerily relevant it can be even in modern times. With the advent of Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Tech titans and startups, you get all sorts of happenings like Tulip Mania, recessions, Feds stepping in, market manipulations a...
DurwinBurger King gave candy to a worker has worked for more than 20 years.
The Whopper, which was first introduced in 1957, was a quarter-pound, oversized burger on a vast five-inch bun that cost a reasonable 29 cents.Large corporations can be cruel and uncaring. They often claim to care about their employees, but sometimes the reality can be quite different. This is the story of Kevin Ford, a cook and cashier at Burger King who had worked tirelessly for over two decades. To celebrate his remarkable feat of never taking a sick day, Burger King decided to shower him ...
DurwinThe youngest self-made billionaire just bought Forbes.
Austin Russell is an American entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies. Luminar specializes in lidar and machine perception technologies, mainly used in autonomous cars. Luminar went public in December 2020, making him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 25.Wha’s up with billionaires and news media? In a stunning turn of events, Austin Russell, the youngest self-made billionaire of 2021, has made headlines once again by acquiring a majority stake in Forbes ma...
CEO of StartupX | DeFi, NFT, Crypto, Web3.0 Builder | Co-Founder at IxSA | Director of Startup Weekend Singapore | Sustainability Champion
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Yea that’s right.
The US government, traditionally not the biggest fan of cryptocurrencies, has over $8 billion in Bitcoin.
While the government has been busy seizing and selling Bitcoin linked to illegal activities, the value of their remaining stash has skyrocketed.
Genius move.
The bad guys do bad things with BTC.
Uncles Sam swoops in to catch them, takes the BTC.
Meanwhile, the value of the cryptocurrencies is going up and down the whole time.
It all started with notable seizures like those from the Silk Road and hackers of the Bitfinex exchange.
Flashback to November 2020, and the US authorities had nabbed a whopping 207,189 bitcoins.
Fast forward to today, and less than 5% of that has been sold.
The most recent sale?
A batch of 9,861 BTC at an average price of $21,800 per Bitcoin — a sum that now seems like a bargain basement deal.
The current price of BTC is nearly double that.
Let’s do some quick math.
Had Uncle Sam held onto all those seized Bitcoins, they’d be sitting pretty with around 400,000 BTC, worth a staggering $17.4 billion.
Think of what good they could do with that kind of money.
Instead, they’ve sold bits and pieces, pocketing around $640 million over the past decade.
It’s like finding a rare Picasso at a yard sale and flipping it for the price of a regular painting.
The US government’s approach to handling Bitcoin has been akin to a cautious investor in an unpredictable stock market.
They’ve sold early, missing out on potential gains, perhaps due to the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies.
But let’s not forget, this isn’t Wall Street; it’s law enforcement recovering assets from illegal activities.
Their primary concern isn’t to maximize profits but to serve justice.
They can’t be seen maximizing every dollar and they aren’t that savvy with it anyway.
Perhaps giving it to a firm that specializes in that would have been a better move.
Now, as we step into 2024, there’s chatter about more Silk Road Bitcoin being offloaded.
Yet, no firm timeline on when they might sell the Bitcoin seized from Bitfinex hackers.
It’s a guessing game with billions at stake.
I am just wondering why they don’t return the coins to the exchange so that they can pay back the users.
Still $640M is a lot of profits to sit on.
So while they were going around catching bad guys and giving crypto a hard time, they quietly made hundreds of millions and potentially billions from it.
Sneaky.
On one hand, there’s a pragmatic approach to dealing with assets tied to crime.
On the other, there’s the tantalizing possibility of what might have been if they’d just held on a little longer.
There must be something smarter the US gov can do.
So criminals, don’t do it.
You do bad things, you may get away with it for a while, but eventually you will get caught.
And the US gov benefits from all of it anyway.
-
Should governments hold on to seized crypto assets?
-
#BitcoinSeizure #USGovernment #CryptocurrencyIrony #SilkRoadBitcoin #BitfinexHack #DigitalTreasure #BitcoinBonanza #CryptoAssets #SeizedBitcoin #GovernmentHoldings #BitcoinValue #CryptoMarket #FinancialIrony #DigitalCurrency #AssetRecovery
Yea that’s right.
The US government, traditionally not the biggest fan of cryptocurrencies, has over $8 billion in Bitcoin.
While the government has been busy seizing and selling Bitcoin linked to illegal activities, the value of their remaining stash has skyrocketed.
Genius move.
The bad guys do bad things with BTC.
Uncles Sam swoops in to catch them, takes the BTC.
Meanwhile, the value of the cryptocurrencies is going up and down the whole time.
It all started with notable seizures like those from the Silk Road and hackers of the Bitfinex exchange.
Flashback to November 2020, and the US authorities had nabbed a whopping 207,189 bitcoins.
Fast forward to today, and less than 5% of that has been sold.
The most recent sale?
A batch of 9,861 BTC at an average price of $21,800 per Bitcoin — a sum that now seems like a bargain basement deal.
The current price of BTC is nearly double that.
Let’s do some quick math.
Had Uncle Sam held onto all those seized Bitcoins, they’d be sitting pretty with around 400,000 BTC, worth a staggering $17.4 billion.
Think of what good they could do with that kind of money.
Instead, they’ve sold bits and pieces, pocketing around $640 million over the past decade.
It’s like finding a rare Picasso at a yard sale and flipping it for the price of a regular painting.
The US government’s approach to handling Bitcoin has been akin to a cautious investor in an unpredictable stock market.
They’ve sold early, missing out on potential gains, perhaps due to the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies.
But let’s not forget, this isn’t Wall Street; it’s law enforcement recovering assets from illegal activities.
Their primary concern isn’t to maximize profits but to serve justice.
They can’t be seen maximizing every dollar and they aren’t that savvy with it anyway.
Perhaps giving it to a firm that specializes in that would have been a better move.
Now, as we step into 2024, there’s chatter about more Silk Road Bitcoin being offloaded.
Yet, no firm timeline on when they might sell the Bitcoin seized from Bitfinex hackers.
It’s a guessing game with billions at stake.
I am just wondering why they don’t return the coins to the exchange so that they can pay back the users.
Still $640M is a lot of profits to sit on.
So while they were going around catching bad guys and giving crypto a hard time, they quietly made hundreds of millions and potentially billions from it.
Sneaky.
On one hand, there’s a pragmatic approach to dealing with assets tied to crime.
On the other, there’s the tantalizing possibility of what might have been if they’d just held on a little longer.
There must be something smarter the US gov can do.
So criminals, don’t do it.
You do bad things, you may get away with it for a while, but eventually you will get caught.
And the US gov benefits from all of it anyway.
-
Should governments hold on to seized crypto assets?
-
#BitcoinSeizure #USGovernment #CryptocurrencyIrony #SilkRoadBitcoin #BitfinexHack #DigitalTreasure #BitcoinBonanza #CryptoAssets #SeizedBitcoin #GovernmentHoldings #BitcoinValue #CryptoMarket #FinancialIrony #DigitalCurrency #AssetRecovery
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