The government can confiscate bitcoin from anyone if they discover a violation, which also threatens all holders. Regulation is something governments have always used as a weapon to seize assets, allowing them to then sell them for any reason.
Stop posting lies. No government has the ability to confiscate Bitcoin from anybody's wallet, that is one of the core principles of Bitcoin.
You're right at some point but not entirely. Governments dont have power to directly confiscate it from their wallets or the place they hold but they can force the person/owner to forcefully hand over the BTC. A while ago in our country there was a case of a youtuber who got held by NCCIA ( National Cyber Crime Investigation Authority ) Pakistan and they confiscated his entire Crypto Holdings in the Name of Investigation. So yeah they have the Power to confiscate it by forcing the owner but not from the system directly.
While your story is accurate, it is misleading and incorrect to claim that Bitcoin can be seized itself and that is what the person was referring to. One of the core principles of Bitcoin is that it can't be seized by someone else, and with stories like that you are confusing what it means to seize something because we are not talking about it in nuance. Here are the differences and more detail:
1) When Bitcoin is used correctly (your keys, secured properly) then
it is resistant to direct seizure also known as direct confiscation. The case that you are referring to is something else, situations like that can be called things like "compelled transfer" or "legal forfeiture under compulsion" (thanks AI).
2) Everything else is susceptible to both direct seizure and the different case that I labelled as compelled transfer and legal forfeiture under compulsion.
This is just another case where words are being used inaccurately in mainstream media. Focus on the key difference in this example:
- A bank account can be seized no matter how much I object or protest.
- My Bitcoin can not be seized no matter what you do, you can kill me but you still won't be able to take it as long as I can endure death -- that is what it means to be sovereign and seizure-proof.
In practice Bitcoin can be effectively seized through a number of ways, but they all relate back to incorrect usage of Bitcoin and those cases do not invalidate any claims that Bitcoin is resistant to direct seizure. For example, custodial services would be a common case, poor security, device seizure and so forth. However if:
1) You control your own keys.
2) You secure it properly.
Optional: 3) You hide your wealth.
Note: This step is labeled optional because someone could come and bring up a stupid counter argument "but you can also hide a bank account" as if it were even at all comparable.
It is absolutely something that can not be seized. In the case that you have presented, there were several mistakes: the government knew about his wealth somehow and he kept this wealth with him. They can't force you to transfer something that you don't have (

) or something to which you allegedly own but have no access to (where is it?). What are they going to do about that? Say that they believe this random person that they have selected has a lot of Bitcoin wealth even if there is no proof of any kind on his devices that the person has anything to do with Bitcoin? Life is not a movie script, if this does happen sometimes (and gets reported by the media) that is because the chance of it happening to you is 1 in a million or 1 in a billion.
This is also directly related to "who can destroy Bitcoin". If it were possible to easily seize Bitcoin, then it would have never reached the adoption and success that it has. Without resistance to seizure, one of the key aspects of Bitcoin falls through. Perhaps even you can claim that the whole system would collapse along with other features. If you can seize Bitcoin then it is not:
- Decentralized.
- Censorship resistant.
- Permissionless.
- Etc.
So, this resistance is actually a key building block. Don't let media and news stories confuse you into disbelief. The main reason why Bitcoin exists how it does is because it can't be seized by anyone. Nobody has ever had their Bitcoin taken away from a cold storage setup unless they did something wrong.