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]

There's not much chance of *all* of it disappearing it that way and the currency is infinitely divisible if required. There will always be enough.

Yeah... because we've never had problems with adding a crapton of floating point and extra decimal places to math with computers before. (rolls eyes) Please. Some of the greatest financial scams of our time were based on rounding and floating point errors. The idea that the currency can be "infinitely divisible" is not a selling point, it's a structural weakness.

Re:Money for his defense

[girlintraining]

So, what you're saying is that Walter White did it right in Breaking Bad when he hired Saul with a rather large retainer.

I'd have to actually turn on a TV to be able to answer that. I'm dimly aware there's some bald guy with a beard on some TV show called 'Breaking Bad' that everyone goes on about on Facebook, and that it has something to do with drugs. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything about the show. The only things on TV I watch are Mythbusters, Shark Week when it rolls around, How Things Work, Engineering Marvels, and similar. I used to watch the History channel, back when it actually had stuff about history on it. Now it seems to be as much about History as the Food channel is about food. I think I could probably watch it for the better part of a day before figuring out how to boil water. -_-

Snark aside though... if this 'Walter White' guy is mass producing drugs for a TV show, the odds are very, very good that the producers have given a highly slanted perspective on how drugs are actually made and distributed, because the day to day is actually quite boring for the people involved... and they don't make as much money as you seem to think either. The drug cartels are, just like regular supra-corporate entities, screwing over their workers and wealth and power tends to be concentrated at the top. It is unlikely a single man producing his own drugs, regardless of the type of drug, could manage production, packaging, distribution, etc., and not attract the attention of these entities. And they don't react like normal businesses do to a newcomer to the market; They tend to show up and either kill you where you stand, or offer you a deal where you basically work for them for next to nothing... or they kill you where you stand.

And all of this ignores law enforcement activity and the peripheral risks, which I'm sure are glorified and hollywooded up in the above-referenced series... but in actuality, there aren't catchy one liners, and dark meetings in alleyways or restaurants with tattooed latino guys with guns, or white guys in suits like in Batman. Conversation and plot is severely lacking in real life... it all revolves around people dying, people not wanting to die, and both sides doing whatever seems best to achieve those respective aims. The conversation, when it happens, tends to be short, to the point, and not particularly noteworthy or quotable. Something to the effect of "You mother fuck--(bang)gggrhhnnggggrrrhhhhh... *gurgle* wrrrrrrr... *wheeze* *gurgle* whyyyyyy? *gurgle* *splat*" Like I said, not particularly quotable.