You'd be fairly well boned on obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Any brilliant plan you think up in the course of a few seconds will be likely to run into the fact that the common law has a thousand years of collective experience.

I didn't know we have thousands of years of breaking encryption and concepts like zero knowledge proofs.

There's no brilliant plan, there's just mathematics.

You don't understand my point at all. Which is also my point.

You just said it would be obstruction of justice, yet a transaction occurring from a known wallet while a suspect is in custody is not enough to prove that. You'd have to prove the conspiracy. You're hand-waving the details away in an attempt to dismiss the argument.

What does the prosecutor do when the funds get moved and the suspect is under lock and key? Because of the decentralized nature of crypto, you cannot even show who moved the funds. All you know is that they were moved.

So if you're a prosecutor, what are you going to show the judge to persuade them that an obstruction of justice has occurred?

Saying "it's math, yerhonner" is itself handwaving. My point is that a court doesn't need to fixate on the crpytographic impossibilities. They can rely on literally any other evidence. They can gladly drag your friends into court to answer questions. Any of your other assets can be seized or frozen.

Folks who think cryptocurrencies are magic cheat codes are just not aware of the flexibility and enormous powers that a court has to overwhelm mechanistic attempts to defeat their decisions.

The defendant doesn't need to say anything, that's the point. The prosecution has to do all the leg work. And they may literally have no other evidence.

- Can the prosecution show where and how Mr. X moved the funds while he was in jail?

- Can they show who he communicated with or ordered to abscond these funds?

- Can they identify who controls the funds now?

- Can they identify anyone else who may have had control of these funds while in their previous wallet?

- Can the prosecution rule with 100% certainty that this was not a hack or theft by some other party, including police?

The answer to those is probably no. Is that enough to convince a judge/jury of reasonable doubt? I'm not a lawyer.

In that scenario, the coins ended up somewhere other than where the court ordered.

That didn't just happen. Someone intended it to happen.

Investigations and all available means will be used to obtain the coins. That could continue for the remainder of time all involved have here.

Yes. I'm not a lawyer, but this is now an issue outside the purveyance of the original court order to decrypt.

It requires new charges to be laid, evidence to be provided, and due process in reasonable time.

My point was the hard physics of it: the assets can be moved, and proving who moved it is very difficult.

That order is very likely part of a greater matter, and that will likely remain unchanged, IMHO.

Others, myself included, totally recognize the physics. That doesn't change the law much, just how it's enforced.

Should all that prove ineffective, as in justice is not served, we can all look forward to new and innovative law too.

In the end, we've got the basic human control issues in play.

The basic human remedies will also remain in play.

Prime example being it's quite possible to make life a real living hell for people, if nothing else. It's also possible to make that all being worth it very difficult to actualize.

You’re talking about a scenario where your wife is moving to Russia avoid US jurisdiction. You can already do that. You can move to Russia, put your money in a Russian bank, and voilà, it is difficult for the US government to sieze it.

The point was to show the flexibility and control over owning your assets. Accounts can be frozen and its game over.

I don’t understand what point you are trying to make, I guess. What I’m hearing is that you can commit the same crimes, but now you can commit these crimes with Bitcoin, and maybe the law will catch up with you, maybe it won’t. It doesn’t sound much like flexibility and control, it sounds like gambling that you are better at hiding assets in Bitcoin than other types of assets.

If you are living in the US and spending money to support your lifestyle you are very likely within the reach of the law, and the money you are spending has to come from somewhere and go to somewhere. If you are not spending your Bitcoin and benefiting from it, then what’s the point? And if you are spending the Bitcoin and benefiting from it, then law enforcement can investigate those transactions.

The point I'm trying to make:

Taking someone's assets vs coercing them to hand over their assets, are not the same thing.

You can take my gold, my dollars, my factories, my real estate, all by force.

You can take my freedom, you can take my life, by force.

You cannot take my Bitcoin by force. You might be able to put me through enough pain for me to give it up. But this is not a guarantee.

We have been discussing this in the context of being a sneaky cyber criminal with a just law system. But imagine you live in a nation where the government (military junta) is "nationalizing" all wealth and assets. Then tell me the best way to protect your money.

> We have been discussing this in the context of being a sneaky cyber criminal with a just law system.

If you were assuming that the law was just then you’ve been having a different conversation. I’ve just been assuming that this is the US legal system, nothing more, nothing less. Do not assume that the US legal system is just.

The US law system is reasonably competent, has a global reach, and can out-wait you.

Resources are not unlimited. Time and attention can only be divided so many ways.

As we speak, billions of dollars of illegal drug cartel money sloshes along the international banking system, sometimes enabled by the banks themselves. The powers that be seem very ineffective at stopping them. I think you have too much confidence in the capabilities of these systems.