Freedom Convoy Canada: how many wallets have been seized by the Canadian government?
How many cryptocurrency wallets have been frozen or, worse, seized because they are linked to the financing of the Freedom Convoy in Canada?
The answer: NONE.
The why is interesting. Underlying it all is the injunction issued by the Ontario Superior Court ( Mareva Injunction ) against convoy organizers (Dichter, Lich, Barber), Pat King, and several people who have been involved in raising Tallycoin for the truck drivers, to which other unidentified people have been added, holders of virtual currency wallets. The sentence forced the seizure of 134 wallets in total.
Then the injunction ordered that any wallet that received funds from one of these wallets also be frozen. So it would not have been possible to move a Satshi to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, BitBuy, etc., even the hot wallets receiving those exchanges would technically be "frozen".
In the past, someone tried to block transactions that were not "fully compliant with AML and OFAC", censoring the others, but the initiative was not successful. After all, according to the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, which consults numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies, only 0.5% of all Bitcoin transactions are of an illicit nature.
So what happened in practice? The injunction itself would say that: " Any other person who is aware of this order and does anything that aids or permits the Defendant to violate the terms of this Order may also be considered contempt of court and may be fined or imprisoned. . “What if a person or authority does not reside in Canada? If it is not aware of the order, like 99.999% of people and wallet holders on the globe?
The simple reality is this: no government can actually seize or freeze anything stored in any wallet held by the owner . In fact, no one can actually "help or allow" the defendants to violate the terms of the order, because only those who hold the private keys of the specified wallets are able to do so.
Courts can issue orders, and the government can issue decrees prohibiting any entity under their jurisdiction from allowing transfers in or out of those addresses – this is what they mean by "freezing" portfolios. However, if the wallet is in the hands of a natural person, or they physically access it with the private key, otherwise they can try to "Limit" it, not seize it. Those wallet holders can still move those Bitcoins to any other BTC address, as long as it is not subject to direct control of the monetary authorities. This means there are approx
1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,000 (ABOUT ….) still usable
Of course, it is true that Bitcoin is not anonymous, it is traceable. However, funds can be tracked, but not blocked. and whoever receives them knows nothing of who sent them. What can he be found guilty of?
Then we have a real universe of entities that do not reside in the jurisdiction of the Ontario Superior Court, which therefore cannot do anything about it. We have, in this universe of entities:
- Non-Canadian regulated exchanges
- Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)
- Exchanges between equals
- Level 2 blockchain
- Wrapped assets
- decentralized finance (DeFi), automated market makers and liquidity pools
How then can the Mareva injunction be applied to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)? Let's take an example with PancakeSwap, which is one of those decentralized DAOs I was talking about. PancakeSwap is not an entity that can readily be subject to a court order, it is a smart contract. So you can't even say that someone willfully violate the court order: it is simply useless, because it cannot put an algorithm in jail.
This is why in an authoritarian and crazy world perhaps having a small reserve in virtual currencies is not so bad.
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The article Freedom Convoy Canada: how many wallets have been seized by the Canadian government? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/freedom-convoy-canada-quanti-wallet-sono-stati-sequestrati-dal-governo-canadese/ on Sun, 06 Mar 2022 16:56:44 +0000.