Bitcoin Forum

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Tip: They can't confiscate something they don't even know that you have. This is also one main reason why a lot of people here(and with Bitcoiners as a whole) have been heavily advocating in using peer-to-peer platforms, rather than spot exchanges like Coinbase.

Well, you have a point here. I don't know how they confiscated 400k BTC from silk road but there are surely ways to lie and claim that you supposedly lost your private keys. The problem this way is that you'll have to maintain the lie. If you've lost your keys and "someone" makes a transaction from your address it would be pretty clear that it's you. Generally, when law comes in action, there aren't many ways to face it and pretend to be an idiot.

^(Sponsored.)
Although, you can catch it up and avoid it with a mixer (https://mycryptomixer.com/) ;)

Here is a small guide on how to "seize" your bitcoins Seizing a suspect’s Bitcoin: A step-by-step guide (https://ngm.com.au/seizing-bitcoin-guide/)

So, how to protect your bitcoins from confiscation? First of all, never tell anyone that you possess any bitcoins. That is the main rule that is very easy to understand and, at the same time, very difficult to follow.

The second rule is never keep your bitcoins on exchanges, custodian wallets, and the like. Not your keys, not your coins.

The third rule is directly related to the first one - avoid using wallets that may reveal the fact that you possess bitcoins. For example, the usage of desktop wallets, mobile wallets, web wallets should be avoided because authorities can easily identify and seize your accounts, your cellphone, your hard drive, or your computer. Hardware wallets and paper wallets, however, are an exception to this rule because you can easily hide them, move them to another location, or even move them to another jurisdiction.

@mk4

For certain offenses, they seize your computers and other devices in order to analyze them. From there, they can see that you have a Bitcoin wallet on it and drain them.

When Bestmixer was closed down, a little later they arrested two people, seized money, jewelry, gold, and several wallets. Knowing that it was a lot of money I don't think these people were stupid to use trading platforms.

Of course, I'm taking the extreme as an example but it shows how it could be possible

@Captain-Cryptory

Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!

Best answer so far, I think being anonymous and using peer-to-peer platforms is much better. I am surprise that they are selling it I was thinking where do the funds go? Well they can't do anything to it rather than to sell it.

There are many people who store their bitcoins on cryptocurrency exchanges.  Currently, cryptocurrency exchanges are actively introducing KYC, AML, etc.  Thus, bitcoin holders lose their anonymity.  Moreover, they do not control the private keys of their bitcoins.  In such situations, cryptocurrency exchanges cooperate with law enforcement agencies. Bitcoins can be confiscated. In fact, people are losing their bitcoins due to trust in intermediaries.  

Let's look at another example.  Some holders store bitcoins in their wallets.  What happens if we manage to establish a relationship between the bitcoin address and the name of the bitcoin owner?  These addresses will be flagged.  If the Bitcoins from these addresses are confiscated, you can never spend them.  This is because the bitcoin blockchain is transparent.

I agree that the best way to avoid seizures is for the authorities to not even know you have Bitcoin, but also even to know that you have them, if you have not done anything illegal they have no legal basis to confiscate any property. Even if someone tried to seize my BTC for any reason, they could only do so if I allowed them to - of course, all those who care about their security know that it is stupid to keep crypto on a personal computer completely unprotected.

Even if I was forced to give them access to my hardware wallet, they would get a wallet with a small portion of the funds, while the majority would be protected with a passphrase and I would never admit to them that it even existed.

Well,here's my short list:
1.Never tell anyone that you own Bitcoins.
2.Never use cryptocurrency exchange platforms that have KYC and require ID.
3.Never use online Bitcoin wallets.
4.Use Bitcoin mixers for all your transactions.The tricky part is to find and use only trustworthy Bitcoin mixers,that aren't connected to the authorities in any way.
5.Use only cold storage and keep your private keys in a very secret place.

If you do all of the above,the government should have a hard time finding and confiscating your Bitcoins,but if you break only one of those rules,you are pretty much exposed.

There are a lot of ways to prevent confiscation, just like theft, you can create a system of encrypted keys that can't be put together by anybody else other than you. The main problem that you will face is not the police tearing your mattress searching for your ledger but the actual charges you will face. A lot of people have handed their bitcoins willingly to the authorities, just like "individual x (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/united-states-files-civil-action-forfeit-cryptocurrency-valued-over-one-billion-us)" did so at the start of the month returning 70k BTC he held from 2013.

So, in the end, it's a matter of choice and what has the state against you.
You hand them down and you walk free or with a suspended sentence or you hold to them and you will enjoy the money in two decades or more or maybe never again.

No one can seize your bitcoins if you keep them in a cold storage out of the reach of a third party. For example, if you hold bitcoins on a paper wallet that you keep somewhere where no one knows about it.
Bitcoin is a decentralized network, no one has control over it, and no one can forcibly seize anyone's bitcoins if they are stored properly.

Very important problem!
I think better solution is to hold your privkeys in a encrypted way.
You can split it in few  parts and keep separately.
Use wallet with strong password

The best option would be to keep your savings in Monero and, if necessary, convert them to bitcoins.  

It will be more reliable than using a bitcoin mixer.  Atomic swaps (XMR - BTC and BTC - XMR) are currently in development:

https://icryptonode.com/blogs/news/bitcoin-to-monero-atomic-swaps-how-this-enables-private-bitcoin-transactions

Bitcoin is not an anonymous or confidential cryptocurrency.  Therefore, it is easy to confiscate it.  However, if Monero is included in the Bitcoin ecosystem, this will change.  Both coins will benefit from this.  

BitcoinBTC will get anonymity and Monero will get many users.

You can also use multisig and someone you trust that they have no way of getting to.
They can be out of the country, out of the jurisdiction, whatever. Not perfect but it will work.

But for the most part yeah, go with the if they don't know you have it they can't take it theory.

Or use a duress / decoy wallets so if they think you have it all they find is .01BTC and the rest is safely hidden away.

-Dave

Well, you can't show them(or anyone else) your coins until they prove they are within their legal/moral limit to confiscate them. If they are trying to seize the coins illegally, you have the right to refuse to tell any of them you own any coin (without lying), whether you really own bitcoins or not. But if they are within their legal/moral limit and ask what the law allows them to ask, I will tell the truth. I will have to be sure they have the right to ask every question they ask.
If you are trying to seize the bitcoin illegally, and ask me if I own bitcoins or how much I own & where they are, I will simply reply that whether I own bitcoins (or any other asset) or not is a private matter.

Unless you’re ultra rich or someone who can afford to pay huge taxes, don’t tell anyone you have something in the bag. Many bitcoin advocates can be vocal about their position because they can pay the governments their ‘fair’ share of taxes from their bitcoins, and most of us here don’t. This is the reason why it’s always best to do transactions P2P as much as possible in order to minimize the risk of being ID’d and your details going the tax man’s table. You can talk about bitcoin, its features, uses and whatnot, but never, ever talk about your holdings or whether or not you have one.

In most cases, information about the private keys of wallets goes to law enforcement agencies, and then to court when they conduct an inspection or search and view your records or the contents of computers, laptops, tablets or other similar gadgets.  Therefore, first of all, you need to take care that information about wallets and their private keys is not freely available in your home.  Nobody can confiscate what the investigation or the court could not get access to.  If you care about the security of this information, no one will be able to confiscate the cryptocurrency.

If they are going to examine my things for the coins I own, I wouldn't wait for them to confiscate my computer and other devices since they obviously knew I got some coins. They may even know how much I got, I'd probably just show it. And hope that they don't know the wallets that are I secretly kept and not even used once but a single deposit to it.

Assuming they already have my information from binance and other exchanges where I submit my documents, I have no way of getting away.

Of course they can not confiscate things they do not know about. But in case you are under investigation or someone from your contacts is, it will not be too hard to learn about your assets in crypto, wallets and so on. Of course it is great to use platforms that tell us about anonymacy, but this anonymacy is a bit conditional. In case some person will attract attention of such bodies or agencies it will not take too much time to learn in deep lots of about you and your assets.

They wouldn't be able to take your coins from you just like that.

First they'd have to prove that you're involved in some serious stuff like drug trading. Small things like not paying tax will rather get you chased by bailiffs but even that would sometimes make people give away their bitcoins rather than see their car and home appliances being taken away and sold.

Learned this tip from my friends who trade, it is helpful although our government does not care that much about cryptocurrency.

Regarding the confiscation, I think that it is fair for the institution to sell it to use it for their payment for their services, if it were confiscated without a ground that the person holding it is doing something illegal then I guess it is unethical and corrupt at best but if it is the other way around then I think that it is justifiable.

I personally think to avoid foreclosure on cryptocurrency first close all the accounts you have on the exchange, because the migrants have important data about you so they think to track all transactions through the bank you use for the exchange. Perhaps the most important thing is never to tell anyone the key to your cryptocurrency wallet, and most importantly separate the BTC or any other cryptocurrency you have in multiple wallets so that what you have is not all visible to them.

I believe you can't avoid btc confiscation in a smart way. If you lie or even if you really lose your password or private keys authorities will probably increase your sentence to compensate that. And you will never touch that money again, because if you do this, the police intelligence will be watching these movements in your address, as it's public, so they will go after you again.
As I see, once someone is caught there is nothing to do besides colaborating with the police forces.

The headline already states that this is a red flag activity. Confiscated BTC should be either be burnt or its private keys should be disposed of. Especially if it is proven that the reason why the  BTC was confiscated was reasonable they already have the full authority over it, no one should benefit from these Bitcoins but the overall hodlers of it. How? Since if they disposed the Bitcoins, it will lower the circulating supply, making it more scarce. And cryptocurrency that is having a huge scarcity will have a huge price as low supply with huge demands will push it.

Yes. But the trick is, try your best to don't get yourself to a situation that you're actually going to be under investigation. Yes, a lot of us have used centralized exchanges in the past(and probably until now), but it's not too late to switch as to prevent further data from being collected.

Also, take a look at "plausible deniability".

Bitcoin can be confiscated by the government, if you’re just seeing it now then I’m sorry to tell you that it’s no longer a new thing, it has been happening. Things like this happens when you’re living in a country where Bitcoin is illegal and you’ happen to be caught with any cryptocurrency at all, the government is going to confiscate it and then put it on auction and sell it.

So, you have to know what works in your country, if cryptocurrency is illegal, then try to be careful and avoid the law enforcement agencies when making use of it, or else you’re going to lose them.

I don't see any legal instance on why they can do that but if the certain individual will get caught doing such illegal things then maybe their bitcoins hold in their positions will be confiscated, but if you are just a trader or doing a legal matters to earn bitcoins then you shouldn't worry about that and for security concerns just don't put your private key on email or bookmark it anywhere since this could lead to a disaster if hackers can penetrate your accounts.

By keeping yourself under the radar you can protect yourself from such events which means that less utilization of centralized exchanges. I think people shouldn't have used them in the first place because then you are not really upholding the main motto of bitcoin and similar crypto.

I believe that this situation and the confiscation of bitcoin in general is unreasonable, especially since some countries do not even have legislation that controls the circulation of cryptocurrency and such confiscation is illegal, I would recommend storing cryptocurrency on decentralized exchanges, you cannot steal money from short exchanges

There is no way other than not revealing that you have/hold crypto currencies. His coins got confiscated because he probably handed over his private keys or the police swept his house and found the private keys.
And yeah, he could say that he lost his keys or doesn't have them. Thing would have been harder for the police but they probably gave him a deal or something which the guy found reasonable.

I agree.

It's all about how you'll carefully blend in, in a country that's have a eye on Bitcoin being use in illegal activities that's why they are confiscating them and sells it in auction. This makes it unfair to those using bitcoin in a legal way, if their Bitcoin get confiscated and sells them by the authority, then that gives no justice at all and so much discrimination.

Because fiat is also being use in illegal ways yet they are not confiscating it without any investigation, but it's the other way around when it comes to Bitcoin.

Oh it is very difficult  to not reveal crypto,  to do so you should  not use crypto at all.. and if you will not use crypto it will be worthless ;p

That are so many links you got there, and as a precaution, I will not click any single one of them it might be a clickbait of some sort, and I think you have violated the rules in the forum you should read them so you can be aware, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0

And on with OP's topic, don't ever talk to any authorities or anyone that you have Bitcoin that's all you need to do so your Bitcoin would not be confiscated if it is ban in your country, and that is why we are anonymous here in the forum so let's just stay anonymous it can add as security for most of us.

in the worst case scenario you'll still be able to buy drugs :)

not exactly - first drug sellers will know you pay with crypto - so they could assume you have crypto,
secondly drug market is surely infiltrated by intelligence agencies, so it could lead even faster to reveal your engagement in cryptospace.