Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

Comments

• Matty_r@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Update: Valuation now only at $50k.

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• makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is 0.02% of the Bitcoin in circulation. The eventual total supply of BTC is 21 million BTC. Bitcoin’s market cap is around 800 billion, which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Next to switzerland, bigger than Norway, Sweden, Vietnam or Israel. (GDP isn’t the same as market cap, just trying to give an example for scale).

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  • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The market cap is bullshit. It doesn’t work like stocks.

    You have to ask how much this is in relation to the volume actually being traded. If(!) this is sold, will people actually pony up 2 billion?

    I don’t trust any of the numbers coming out of that industry, so IDK.

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    • makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why not? It’s a thing people can buy and sell on the open market just like stocks or futures or whatever. There are dozens of exchanges you can use all around the globe that publish their data openly, that is where average price and market cap comes from, just like a stock. If one exchange is fudging the price, that creates an arbitrage opportunity which is immediately exploited by trading bots. We are well past the point of the market price being found on exchanges somehow not being real.

      re the 2 billion: Massive buys and sells change the price just like with stocks or other assets. The market cap is not the real amount you would pay if you tried to buy all the available supply. It’s just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.

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  • sugartits@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The total supply is 21 million. But a lot has been lost due to people losing their keys.

    How much is difficult to measure, but you can probably take 20% off that number and be somewhat safe.

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    • makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.

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• pm_me_your_titties@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Woah! 48000 bitcoins!

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  German law enforcement authorities said Tuesday they seized nearly €2 billion ($2.17 billion) worth of bitcoins in the eastern state of Saxony.

  The Saxon State Criminal Police Office said the seizure of 50,000 bitcoins could be the biggest to date of its kind in Germany.

  Police said they were investigating two men, aged 40 and 37, who are suspected of running a piracy website until the end of 2013.

  Authorities allege the men bought bitcoins from the money they earned from the portal.

  The seizure came after the “accused voluntarily transferred” the bitcoins to an official wallet of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), police added in a statement.

  The BKA did not provide further details about the transfer, but investigators cited by German news agency dpa said no decisions had been made regarding cashing in the bitcoins.

  ---

  The original article contains 174 words, the summary contains 130 words. Saved 25%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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• Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its decentralised blah blah blah and yet the government took it.

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  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They gave it over to the government. If you have the private keys, you control the coin. If you don’t, no amount of money or guns can make that coin move thanks to math.

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    • adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There’s always a relevant XKCD.

      xkcd.com/538/

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  • Fades@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t know what I’m talking about

    This u?

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    • Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No?

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  • jwing@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That is a weird way of admitting that you rushed to the comment section instead of, you know, reading the article.

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