Slashdot Mirror
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.
That's easy: The value of each bitcoin in circulation increases.
I believe you lack adequate information on how Bitcoin works. If he or someone he trusts and gave instructions to beforehand has access to another copy of the wallet, it's just as good as the original, and the coins may be transferred elsewhere and converted to other currencies, etc via the normal exchanges. I'll be surprised if the prosecuting authorities manage to figure out how to track that; they certainly won't be able to stop it. If by some chance they manage to gain access to the encrypted keys that protect the wallet in their possession, it almost certainly won't be of any value (to them) by then.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln)
Umm, bad news: As of this submission, there were 11,800,375 coins created so far. The "theoretical maximum" is 21 million coins, yes, but you forgot each coin is divisible by https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#21_million_coins_isn.27t_enough.3B_doesn.27t_scale
">100,000,000. So in actuality, there are 2,099,999,997,690,000 units of currency that can be traded without modification to the current protocol. What most people don't understand about bitcoin is that even if a few coins here and there fall out of circulation, or even more than a few, so long as there are a sufficient number of atomic currency units available for trade, the system will function perfectly. Trading in bitcoins is more like trading in company stock than in actual currency -- they can be divided, aggregated, etc., etc. A bitcoin is, at the protocol level, just a token for a massive transactional log called the 'block chain'. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins are generated, or how many fall out of circulation, as long as enough remain in circulation to cover the transactions since the last block in the chain was created.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
That person is now no longer a person, but a government. Just a minor footnote. Now, all that said, here's the thing about bitcoins... should we ever run out of them for whatever reason, we can always 'reset the clock' as it were -- start a new seed, a new block zero, and start building a new block chain from there. This isn't like IPv4 address space exhaustion; We just plug in a new seed and viola, Bitcoin Mark II.
Eeeh... all that said, I don't trade in bitcoins and I think the entire business is silly but if we're going to talk turkey, we should at least be accurate in our assessments.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Judging from what you're saying, you'd probably enjoy Breaking Bad. You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the way it handles its subject matter.
Or option d: You made shit up earlier, and are now making up more shit to avoid admitting that. And the rest of your posts don't really suggest you have the capability of learning law on the fly. And even if you did, law enforcement isn't exactly famous for helping people get out of drug-related charges, or helping them research technicalities.
Friend Occam, what do you say?
Losing to a non-native speaker of your language in eloquence of expression is not exactly something to brag about, now is it?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.