Bitcoin (BTC), which is worth more than $7.2 billion, remains controlled by the US government, but its losses are mounting.
Data from on-chain analysis company Glassnode shows that the total Bitcoin seized in Washington amounted to 210,429 BTC as of October 31.
195,000 BTC sold, $6.3 billion less
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are well-known—perhaps accidentally—for being two of the biggest Bitcoin whales in the world.
Through various legal methods, lawmakers have seized large amounts of BTC over the years, and only a small percentage of their profits are resold at auction.
Those who chose to buy the profits benefited greatly, and, to add more irony, the DOJ—more like a Bitcoin newbie than a whale—was guilty of selling too early.
According to statistics compiled by Jameson Lopp, co-founder of the Bitcoin custody company Casa, the government has so far lost a total of more than $6 billion in potential profits from the sale of 195,092 BTC.
No entity other than Satoshi Nakamoto owns more BTC than the DOJ. The largest corporate BTC treasury, for example, owned by MicroStrategy, currently consists of 158,245 BTC ($5.43 billion), according to data from the monitoring resource BitcoinTreasuries.
Heavy bag of Bitcoin
Glassnode shows the DOJ’s stash growing in step with attack announcements.
By early 2022, its inventory had grown to nearly 100,000 BTC—at the time worth $3.6 billion—thanks to legal action against individuals accused of trying to launder profits from the 2016 hack of the major cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.
Meanwhile, billionaire Tim Draper, one of the original bidders for the BTC auction, recently accused the US government of suppressing the growth of cryptocurrencies.
Having previously predicted a price of $250,000 per BTC by 2022, Draper admitted that political decisions “killed the geese in Silicon Valley that laid the golden eggs.”
“Regulations stifle innovators,” said one X post from May.
