140
In order to SEIZE funds from a Bitcoin wallet, the FBI would have to:
1) Physically get one of the computers or laptops where the wallet software was running
2) Get the wallet password, if there was any (it would have to be written down in a file, or on a piece of paper)
3) Crack the wallet password -- if these were real hackers, they would have had a very long password which would have taken a very long time to crack
4) If the "hackers" used an exchange address the FBI could've seized it all but it's very stupid, because it has KYC and can be seized by the Exchange who owns all the private keys. That's the only way you could have an "account". The exchange would have to fall under FBI jurisdiction, or in a country with agreements with the FBI, otherwise, no luck.
What are the odds these "hackers" don't know sh*t about crypto and jurisdiction??? I'm not trying to evade capture from the FBI and I know all these things.
The FBI can see the public address to which the Bitcoin was sent, but they cannot extrapolate the private key from it. It would take all the computers in the world longer than they can be in service to figure that out.
Without the private key, they can see the funds sitting in the public addresses they're describing, and they can trace them down the chain, but unless one of those addresses is tied to a physical transaction or address (i.e. online purchase) they don't know who owns it. And they cannot control said funds.
Craig Wright has been saying he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and therefore that he can control Satoshi's funds, yet he has never been able to move them (they've been sitting for years).
Since Bitcoin is a public ledger, and those addresses can't give anyone the private key, the FBI could've published them, so we could see if it's true that those funds are there. They didn't.
Of course, if they had published them, we could watch them and see if they indeed had control and what they did with those funds.
They're definitely hiding something.
