Analysis: The U.S. has seized nearly 200,000 bitcoins to date, global confiscations are up to 453,000

Bitcoin’s most important value proposition is arguably censorship resistance. Put simply, if the best practices are followed, nobody can freeze or seize your bitcoin holdings. Anyone who owns the private key is the holder of the bitcoins. If the private key is either encrypted or simply memorized, no authority can get to the associated bitcoin. And yet it happens and has happened quite often; usually because criminals don’t use best practices. According to The Block’s findings, the total amount of seized bitcoins is now 1 out of every 40 -- 2.6% of the circulating supply.

Last week, there was a widely circulated quote on social media from a recent News Journal article that said that “many bitcoin analysts believe the U.S. government today controls more bitcoins than anyone else in the world.” It turns out that the source of that claim was a Wired article from December 2013.