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Well, they found the coins last year, and are only opening their mouths now.
I imagine they shut their mouths and tried to map all the scenarios out. They considered just selling a few coins a year to stay under the radar, but at that rate they would die long before they had enough money to make a difference. So then they figured they should unload it all at once. It's worth more in antique coin form than it would be melted down, so it would be better to keep them as coins. How can you unload thousands of antique coins on the coin market without drawing attention to yourself? You can't. They had to figure out how to do that, and the only way is to do it legitimately. So they researched the law and figured they had a legal claim to ownership of the gold. (Maybe they didn't know about the 1900 US Mint theft. It wasn't well publicized.) They looked in to taxes and realized half of proceeds would go to the government, and they had to pay taxes on it the same year they found it. That means since they found it last year, it's all due April 15th of this year. So now they are going public to publicize the coins and drive up interest in the auctions that are sure to come. Not much time left. They had to act now.
Or maybe they found the coins ten years ago, and have been slowly unloading them a bit each year, and are now impatient and willing to just pay the taxes to get the lump sum payout.
It's like money laundering, except even harder because these coins are rare.
Can you imagine trying to sell off a famous stolen painting?
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