Fix! The US Government Becomes The Most Bitcoin Owners With A Total Of 214,682 Bitcoins, The Results Of Confiscation From Crime Perpetrators

The US has hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins. (Photo; Doc. Unsplsah)

JAKARTA - The United States government secretly owns Bitcoin (BTC). Unmitigated, the US has 214,682 Bitcoin BTC. This amount is about 1 percent more than Bitcoin's total supply of only 21 million BTC. However, it is Bitcoin the government confiscated three times from digital asset criminals.

The first major confiscation re-revealed in November 2020, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) detailed that it seized 69,370.22 BTC which was worth more than US$1 billion (equivalent to Rp15.6 trillion) at the time. Today, the deposits confiscated from someone nicknamed "Individual X" are even greater, worth 1.36 billion dollars (approximately Rp21.3 trillion), according to a Bitcoin.com report.

Then on February 1, 2022, onchain analysts saw 94,636 BTC consolidated into one address. The coins came from the 2016 Bitfinex hack and less than a week later, US law enforcement officials explained that the funds were confiscated and two individuals (Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan) were arrested. More than 94 thousand BTC confiscated from Morgan and Lichtenstein worth 1.86 billion dollars (equivalent to Rp29 trillion) today.

The third is the latest confiscation of the Silk Road fraud case which is the third major deposit the US government has confiscated since the seizure of Individual X. Bitcoin Silk Road which was recently confiscated was worth 997 million dollars (equivalent to Rp15.6 trillion) in BTC prices today. The three Bitcoin confiscation cases added up to a total of 214,682 BTC, which is equivalent to 1.02 percent of Bitcoin's 21 million maximum supply.

That way, the US government holds more bitcoins than the Bitstrategy 130,000 BTC and Block.one deposits by 140,000 BTC. The only bitcoin (BTC) holder publicly known to more coins than the FBI is the Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which holds 643,572 BTC today.

Bitcoin Confiscation Auction

Even so, it is not yet known when the US government will auction off the confiscated Bitcoin amounting to hundreds of thousands of BTC. Previously, the US government used the Public Service Administration (GSA) to auction BTC and LTC worth 377,000 dollars (Rp 5.9 billion) in June 2021. In addition, there were a number of small BTC auctions sponsored by the government before 2021 as well. Investors also often buy digital assets from this confiscation, one of which is the Drapper Team.

Despite the confiscated results, with the amount of Bitcoin, the US government is the owner of the largest Bitcoin compared to other governments in various countries. At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin was trading at the level of IDR 283,131,721. BTC prices have decreased by 8.3 percent in the last 24 hours, based on data from Coinecko.