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FBI Seized 144,000 Bitcoins ($28.5 Million) From Silk Road Bust
SonicSpike writes "An FBI official notes that the bureau has located and seized a collection of 144,000 bitcoins, the largest seizure of that cryptocurrency ever, worth close to $28.5 million at current exchange rates. It believes that the stash belonged to Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old who allegedly created and managed the Silk Road, the popular anonymous drug-selling site that was taken offline by the Department of Justice after Ulbricht was arrested earlier this month and charged with engaging in a drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracy as well as computer hacking and attempted murder-for-hire. The FBI official wouldn't say how the agency had determined that the Bitcoin 'wallet' — a collection of Bitcoins at a single address in the Bitcoin network — belonged to Ulbricht, but it was sure they were his. 'This is his wallet,' said the FBI official. 'We seized this from DPR,' the official added, referring to the pseudonym 'the Dread Pirate Roberts,' which prosecutors say Ulbricht allegedly used while running the Silk Road."
...but if they have the account credentials they can simply transfer all the bitcoins to a new holding account to which they have the only credentials.
Which is exactly what the article suggests they've done:
"The FBI official pointed me towards this Bitcoin address, which according to the public Bitcoin transaction record known as the “blockchain” received transfers of close to 144,000 in just the last 24 hours. “They finished moving them at 3am this morning,” said the official."
This leads to an interesting problem for the FBI...
They can either keep them in that account forever, basically useless to anyone...
Convert them to US dollars, just about the single most Bitcoin-legitimizing action I can imagine...
Or they can actually use them as Bitcoins.
The last one gets interesting, because the FBI has accidentally revealed their own current address by this large transfer to themselves. Bam, we have one "known bad" address. Anyone they trade with, then, becomes tainted by association. Would you trust, for example, a VPN service that has accepted payments from the FBI?
It's an extremely uninteresting problem.
Tainted by association makes no sense at all. If you limit the association to direct association, it's trivial to bypass by creating intermediaries. If you make the taint spread, then almost everyone is tainted, so there's nothing to gain. You might as well try to avoid people that are 7 degrees of separation or less from Kevin Bacon.