In November of 2020, a person identified by the US Department of Justice only as “Individual X” sat down with an IRS agent named Tigran Gambaryan and prosecutors at the US Attorney’s office in San Francisco. That unnamed individual typed out the long string of characters of a Bitcoin private key on Gambaryan’s laptop, allowing Gambaryan to move 69,370 bitcoins from Individual X’s bitcoin address to one controlled by the US government.
Over the four years that it has taken the US government to establish legal ownership of that massive sum of bitcoins—identified by the IRS as stolen proceeds of the Silk Road dark-web drug market—its value has grown to
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