People around the world are kicking themselves for not jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon earlier - especially those who knew about the cryptocurrency and could have been sitting on a nice little jackpot by now.
At the time of writing, according to Coinbase, one of the largest digital currency exchanges, one Bitcoin is worth £12,509 ($16,699) - which is an increase of more than £7,000 since last month.
So, imagine how stoked the politicians of Bulgaria are after discovering they had enough Bitcoin in their possession to pay off a fifth of the country's national debt, which totals $16.5 billion.
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But the word 'discover' would be slightly misleading as it's not as if they were just sitting in an unused storage closet. The virtual currency collection was confiscated in an anti-corruption operation. How you go about seizing a digital currency we have no idea, but the Bulgarian authorities clearly did.
Back in May, an investigation by the Southeast European Law Enforcement Centre into Alleged Customs Fraud led to dozens of people being arrested and the confiscation of a whole bunch of Bitcoin.
To be precise, they nabbed 213,519 Bitcoins.
When that operation concluded, that number of Bitcoins were worth roughly £374 million ($500 million). Not too shabby. Now, though, they're worth £2.6 billion ($3.6 billion) - which is just plain silly.
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But here's the question: Does Bulgaria hold on with the expectation that their value continues to rise stratospherically and they can pay off even more of their debt, or do they cash out now and settle for they already have?
That's the question that virtually every gambler is faced with.
The lucrative operation resulted in police seizing 'equipment, devices for communication, computers, tablets, and bank documents' according to the SELC. The authorities are probably hoping for their sake - that that cache of documents and computers also had all the encrypted passkeys needed to access the digital wallets.
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Otherwise, their haul, no matter how much it's valued at, is essentially useless.
It's hard to believe that at the start of this year, one bitcoin was only worth around three figures; so the fact it's now commanding price tags of £12,509 EACH is nothing short of incredible. Experts keep talking about the cryptocurrency bubble bursting, but it hasn't hit that ceiling....yet.
Some people are even predicting it rising in value to over £74,949 ($100,000), so who the fuck knows where the roof on this thing is.
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All we know is that we would very much like to have as many as Bulgaria.
Sources: Zero Hedge, RT
Topics: Bitcoin, News, Interesting, Technology, Fraud