Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion
Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion
German authorities have seized 50,000 bitcoins, worth some €2 billion, in what could be the largest seizure to date in the country.
Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion::German authorities have seized 50,000 bitcoins, worth some €2 billion, in what could be the largest seizure to date in the country.
Update: Valuation now only at $50k.
If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is roughly 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 USD, 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).
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.
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. Those coins being sold on exchanges and the prices they are being listed are are determined by real people (or companies or whoever) who own Bitcoin. They set the price they are willing to buy/sell at. The protocol doesn't sell any itself, there's not some massive reserve waiting to be sold.
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, we passed that point like a decade ago. One can argue how real the reported trading volume is, but price per coin and therefore market cap? Nope.
A stock is a promise/asset, enforced by the legal system, saying you own part of a company. You can trade it with other people and use it to vote on shareholder resolutions. Bitcoin is a currency/asset whose ownership and system of rules is enforced by a decentralized protocol. You can trade it with other people and use it as a currency/use it to send value from one place to another. You could use stocks as a currency, of course, they're just kind of cumbersome to use for that purpose.
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 (or sell) all the available supply because that number is uknowable. It's just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.
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.
True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.
Woah! 48000 bitcoins!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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!
Its decentralised blah blah blah and yet the government took it.
They handed over their own BTC 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 and physics. However, a $5 wrench rammed repeatedly into your head may make you divulge those private keys. Strength of encryption is rarely the weakest link in any modern cryptographic system. But that wrench used on anybody who doesn't know the keys? Useless. It's pretty powerful stuff in that regard.
There's always a relevant XKCD.
I don’t know what I’m talking about
This u?
No?
That is a weird way of admitting that you rushed to the comment section instead of, you know, reading the article.