That's very unfair to the rats. Rats are actually quite social creatures.

Also, the one where a gull ate a live rabbit whole. These things are frightening.

Rats are actually quite nice and social animals, so that checks out.

Did they? So if BTC had dropped to $10 instead of going up, would you say those people had only lost $360, even though it was 127k when it was stolen?

How about the fact that it's highly unlikely the money was stolen as bitcoin, but was far more likely to have been stolen directly out of normal accounts and converted into bitcoin? So if I steal $10,000 from your bank and use it to buy a car, did I steal your money, or did I steal your car?

The problem is it's highly unlikely they actually stole bitcoin directly. It's much more likely they stole money through wire transfers/credit cards/etc. and routed it through a bitcoin exchange so the transaction couldn't be reversed.

Except the gold could have increased in value that much - it's unlikely, but a combination of factors could have lead to a massive increase in value.

And while the BTC did go up, it could have just as easily went down. So if the value had gone to, say, 1/10 the people who lost 127k should have only been allowed to recover 12.7k instead?

Plus you're making the assumption that they even stole BTC from people directly. It's much more likely these were cash transfers from bank accounts or credit cards that the criminals routed through bitcoin exchanges.

Yes. If the court ruled you owed $100k, you would be liable for the remaining 50k.

Except it's not that they undervalued it - at the time of the seizure it was worth 127k. The issue came because the value went up by the time the court case concluded. The police had no way to know this would happen, and may even have used the current cash value to avoid ruining the case if the opposite happened and BTC tanked - if the value dropped far enough before the court case started it could theoretically be too low to qualify for the charges filed.

Because the people lost the 127k. They got that back. The criminals got refunded the remaining 1.3 million.

Or had their keys on something else that was seized. If you've got your keys stored on your computer, and they seize the computer, then they've got your bitcoin.

Think of it this way: the police say you stole $100,000. When they raid your home, they seize a bar of gold. The court orders you to repay the $100,000. To make this happen, the police sell your seized gold bar, which fetches $1,000,000. Logically you get the remaining $900,000 back.

That's what happened in this case - the police said a certain cash value (not a particular number of bitcoin) were criminal gains. They sold the seized bitcoin to recover the ill-gotten funds, which resulted in far more cash value than they were ordered to repay. As such, the remaining balance legally had to be returned.