Media says “It doesn’t matter where the Bitcoin wallet is—the FBI still can get access”. These are dishonest lies. Stop lying and fooling people, FBI & Media!

According to media reporters, FBI claims that it can get access to bitcoin stored anywhere. That is just impossible, unless somehow they have developed ways to crack SHA256 and brute force wallet private keys. In which case, BTC is the least of everyone's worries and state/nuclear secrets could be under risk.

While Bitcoin isn’t stored on a server, the private keys to unlock the Bitcoin may have been. In any event, an FBI official just told reporters that it doesn’t matter where the Bitcoin wallet is—the FBI still can get access. They won’t say how.

And clueless media reporters are taking this to the next level by parroting and amplifying these distorted narratives.

FBI can empty anybody's wallet.

What rubbish, if FBI can empty anyone's wallet they can get BTC from the top addresses and all become billionaires themselves. This is some of the weakest FUD but people still seem to be falling for this.

Edit: Lots of comments seem to suggest that governments are developing or have developed "quantum computers" that can crack/hack bitcoin private keys. While quantum computers can definitely become a threat to cryptocurrencies in the future, they are not presently anywhere close to being capable of deriving the private key for a bitcoin address.

As per u/BreakingBaIIs :

I did a back-of-envelope calculation that showed that it would be faster to mine all the remaining bitcoins 6 billion times than it would to crack a single private key using brute force.

If the FBI found a way to efficiently crack a private key, that would mean they solved the most important math problem humanity has ever faced, that P=NP (in the affirmative). What they could do would go far beyond breaking all of the Internet's security protocols (which they could do). They would be able to solve all the mathematical theorems that humanity has ever worked on for thousands of years, plus many new ones we never thought about, in a matter of days or hours. They would be able to efficiently create superhuman AI using modest computational resources.

The complexity of cracking a single BTC private key is large and currently not in existence.

Moreover, if such a powerful computer existed, it would be a threat to several other things rather than bitcoin and crypto. The entire internet runs on cryptographic encryption. Nothing would be safe. In fact, someone in possession of much less powerful quantum computing power can easily hack into Federal reserve and transfer out every dollar there, or hack into Bank of England and shut everything down. In other words, cryptocurrencies would not even be among the top threats, because much bigger and important threats would be easily taken over.

If they had quantum computers, they wont be asking Apple to de-encrypt devices seized from criminals.

If they have quantum computers that can reverse engineer the private keys to any BTC address, they wont bother recovering measly 60 BTC from the 80 BTC ransom, when they can just send BTC to zero by hacking and moving Satoshi coins, thus destroying BTC's narrative completely.

Tl:dr – Its preposterous to suggest anything like this exists. While it is true that research and development on quantum computers is an ongoing topic, there is no evidence to suggest that such a quantum computing system exists today that can derive BTC private keys from just the addresses.