What should government agencies do with criminal crypto?

A huge amount of crypto gets siezed every year from criminals, and the recent stories of the US government selling off seized crypto assets got me thinking - what really should happen to this?

The numbers start adding up real quick when you look at someone the biggest cases:

1. Silk Road: The US government seized 174,000 bitcoins, worth around $1.2 billion at the time, in connection with the shutdown of the dark web marketplace Silk Road in 2013.

2. PlusToken: Chinese authorities seized $4.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency, including bitcoin, ethereum, and others, in connection with the PlusToken pyramid scheme in 2019.

3. AlphaBay: The US government seized 144,336 bitcoins, worth around $48 million at the time, in connection with the shutdown of the dark web marketplace AlphaBay in 2017.

4. BitMEX: US authorities seized $2.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency, including bitcoin and ethereum, in connection with an alleged money laundering scheme by the BitMEX exchange in 2020.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, smaller scale criminals are getting busted all the time It looks like we are easily into the billions teratory as a total seized over the last few uears alone. Crypto total marlet cap is around 1.2 trillion, but this is still a pretty big number.

It's awesome if funds can be returned to users, but as far as I read, this very rarely happens - limited more to DEX scam victims.

Some may argue it should be sent to a burn address - interesting idea and reduces supply... but I can't see them throwing good money away, and whilst reduced supply is good it just doesn't feel right.

IMHO I'd like to see some of that being put into social/support services - you'd get a-lot of hospitals and schools built and people paid even with small proportions of this, but I guess it disappears back into the system... it could do so much more good - what do you think?