The Balkan nation of Bulgaria learned the other day that it’s among the beneficiaries of the Bitcoin boom. The price of the digital currency rocketed from around $1,000 at the beginning of the year to roughly $16,000 at the time of writing. That makes the cumulative outstanding value of the currency (or as they’d call it in the world of stocks, “market cap”) over $260 billion.
Wow!
A small country you wouldn’t expect owns roughly 1.3 percent of all Bitcoins in circulation, or roughly $3.4 billion at current prices: Bulgaria. It wasn’t even a strategic investment on the nation’s part, according to the Daily Mail
Bulgarian police have seized enough Bitcoins to pay off a fifth of the country’s national debt after the value surged by 600% in half a year.
Officers are said to have confiscated hundreds of thousands of units of the virtual currency worth $500million from an organised crime gang in May.
Dozens of offenders were arrested in May following an investigation by the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center into an alleged customs fraud.
The organisation, which comprises 12 member states, said at the time: ‘The offenders choose the Bitcoin way of investing/saving the money, because it is rather difficult to be tracked and followed.’
Bitcoin’s reputation as an “anonymous” currency doesn’t exactly carry over to the U.S., where the IRS already employs tracking technology on the crypto-currency to stop tax cheats and money laundering.
This must come as a major relief for the nation, which essentially just received a free bailout. With a population of only 7 million and average income of $7,924 per person, the money has the potential to go a long way – provided the government doesn’t waste it.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, had its largest bitcoin sale back in November of 2015, whereas 44,000 Bitcoins seized from illegal activity were sold for $14.6 million ($331.80 per coin). Not like it makes any statistical difference for a nation like ours with a national debt of over $20 trillion, but those coins would be worth a cool $704 million had they been held until today.
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