SWEDEN TO PAY DRUG DEALER R20 MILLION WORTH OF BITCOIN

In what has been hailed as a first in the country’s cryptocurrency legal battle, Sweden has to pay a drug dealer the equivalent of R20 million worth of bitcoin.

When the Swedish Enforcement Authority seized 36 bitcoins from a drug dealer, the coins worked out to be worth approximately R2 million.

When the drug dealer was arrested and the bitcoins confiscated, nobody thought bitcoin would grow as much as it did in two years' time. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, grew tremendously in two years.

The Telegraph reports that at that time, Prosecutor Tove Kullberg successfully argued in court that the drug dealer should be stripped off of his illegally earned bitcoin. Kullberg, however, used the monetary equivalent to make her case at the time, not anticipating the pace at which bitcoin’s value would grow.

Even though the Swedish government knows that the bitcoin was funded with illegal drug money, it still has to return the bitcoins.

Kullberg told reporters that the lesson to be learned from this is to keep the value in bitcoin, that the profit from the crime should be 36 bitcoin, regardless of what value bitcoin has at the time.

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