DOJ Hasn't Actually Found Silk Road Founder's Bitcoin Yet

Techdirt has an interesting followup on the arrest and indictment of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, in connection to which the FBI seized 26,000 or so Bitcoins. From the Techdirt piece: "However, in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins. You might notice the disconnect between the 26,000 Bitcoins seized and the supposed 600,000 Ulbright made. It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road. Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that the FBI does not have them, nor does it have any way of getting at them just yet. And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation, those Bitcoins could remain hidden -- though, I could see the court ordering him to pay the dollar equivalent in restitution (though still not sure that would force him to decrypt the Bitcoins)." The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.

Comments

Re:Disappearing Bitcoins

[girlintraining]

As you have indicated a preference for brevity in your sarcastic fuck you, I shall in turn be brief in my own.

This isn't a weather simulator where the numbers are going to be raised to the hundredth power, it's basic, linear algebra here.

False, and False.

Name one that didn't just collect tiny pieces at a time but actually used floating point errors.

Y2K; A lot of time variables use floating point (decimal) instead of integer. As I understand it, that was an expensive fix that caused financial chaos. As well, there's a detailed explanation about exactly why floating point should never be used in financial transactions, regardless of the number of decimal points the library can be accurate to. And here's the wiki explaining how these problems simply cannot be overcome, it's a theoretical impossibility.

then it would be handled uniformly and that won't be an issue.

A computer that consistently gets the wrong answer is not any less wrong because it does so uniformly.

Explain. And don't just shit out a wall of text that evades the subject like you usually do.

I try to be as specific as possible to avoid confusion, but in the future, to honor your request, I will simply say "Fuck you, you're wrong, good day sir." Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Fuck you. You're wrong. Good day sir.