>Cryptocurrency gains are taxable in many (most?) countries.

So?

>Clearly the governments see cryptocurrency as something more than just random numbers without meaning.

Not really? It's the realized gains that get taxed. That's a completely generic feature of the tax system, the government doesn't give a shit (and shouldn't) what people decide has value in any given transaction. The only thing they care about is whether or not there was actual cash equivalent value exchange happening. Barter is always a potentially taxable event. The government makes no judgement on whether you do it with pretty river rocks or random numbers, they can assess the value of the exchange as if it was done with cash and tax that result.

Re: Seizure of everything related to an illegal operation: sure, they will take everything they can find regardless. They'd take a computer with a ~/.ssh full of random keys too. The data they seize might also have pirated movies/games/music. Some of the things might have "value" but that doesn't make them currency.

None of this implies the result you clearly wish it did.

>Is the government agency just going to throw its hands in the air and say “oh well, he guessed the random number, nothing more we can do!” No, I think not.

You "think not"? Why not? What laws do you think are being violated? There are lots of cases where the government will seize something that might at the time of the seizure be worth $X, and then legitimate activity happens elsewhere such that now it's worth $0.5X or whatever, and that's perfectly fine. The question hinges on whether the activities of other independent people/entities unrelated to the criminal entity that got seized are legitimate or not. It's not a matter of vibes. Like, imagine the government seizes a winning lotto ticket. And then before they can do anything with it somebody unconnected else goes into a convenience store and legitimately buys a ticket, guessing the number too. The value of what the government seized has just dropped. Would I expect the government to throw its hands in the air and say “oh well, he guessed the random number, nothing more we can do!”

Well, yes? That is indeed my expectation, within the rules of the game in question. If the lotto says "if you fail to claim your winning ticket within 1 week before someone else guesses it as well then too bad" or "well then you both split it 50/50" or whatever, yeah I'd expect the government to be held to the exact same standard as anyone else.

> You "think not"? Why not? What laws do you think are being violated?

Actually we have real world examples of this very sort of thing: someone stealing cryptocurrency from a government agency seizure using the publicly knowable private keys for a wallet. No quantum computer was even involved, just plain old human error.

In South Korea this year, a government agency released pictures of a physical seizure that included written down mnemonic seed phrase.

The funds were then stolen, using that seed phrase.

And then:

> A Korean National Police Agency official said at a press briefing on the 3rd that "the first thief submitted a confession to the Cybercrime Reporting System on the 28th of last month, so on the 1st we arrested the person based on that and are tracking the secondary thief."

https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-society/2026/03/03/2HRCGVESIZBT...

So there you have it. The government in South Korea considered this a theft. An arrest was made. Investigations were made.

It is so very obvious that this is what would happen when you steal cryptocurrency from the government. Even when the government agency itself was the one to accidentally publish the private keys so that they became public knowledge.

> It's the realized gains that get taxed. That's a completely generic feature of the tax system, the government doesn't give a shit (and shouldn't) what people decide has value in any given transaction

If I buy a vintage computer second hand for $1500 and then manage to sell it to someone else for $2000, I don’t owe taxes on that.

But if I buy $1500 worth of bitcoin and then sell those bitcoins for $2000, I owe taxes on that.

So yes, the government does “give a shit” what people decide has value in any given transaction.