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US Marshals Accidentally Reveal Potential Bidders For Gov't-Seized Bitcoin
jfruh (300774) writes "When the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road marketplace, they seized its assets, including roughly $18 million in bitcoin, and despite the government's ambivalence about the cryptocurrency, they plan to auction the bitcoin off to the highest bidder, as they do with most criminal assets. Ironically, considering many bitcoin users' intense desire for privacy, the U.S. Marshall service accidentally revealed the complete list of potential bidders by sending a message to everyone on the list and putting their addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field."
This is what happens when you have a single point of failure like a stupid, technically illiterate secretary added to the mix.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I once compared the bitcoin forums to Tartuga from Pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone agreed. Everyone scams everyone, nobody follows the laws, and you have to be smart to not get burned. Those are the people bidding on these. The last thing you want to do is expose their contact info to each other. They just started World War III in the bitcoin world. Close up your storm shutters because there's a shitstorm blowing in.
Am I the only one who gets disturbed every time it's blithely mentioned that this or that police agency gets to take spoils for themselves? It seems a little... inherently corrupt.
If you think that the leak is a failure, well, it's a PLANNED FAILURE
The Fed doesn't like bitcoins, feels very threaten by bitcoins, and hope that nobody will deal in bitcoins
With the sale of those bitcoins of course they will execute a planned failure that will look to the world at large as a "leak"
It is never a leak, it is a PLANNED LEAK
I'm not so sure. I'm thinking that Hanlon's Razor should be applied here.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Fine, but that doesn't change my basic point. Why bother with an auction that will necessarily get less than an open market?
The same reason you wholesale anything; You get a transaction that moves a large volume quickly. Basically all consumer goods you buy in any kind of branded store works this way, Wholesalers, whether manufacturers or a middleman, sell large volume to companies who then take the burden of distribution but reap the benefits of charging retail price and profiting on the difference between that and the wholesale cost plus infrastructure/logistics costs. The wholesaler gets the benefit of moving a large volume at an agreed upon price and not having to worry about inventory control, distribution, or logistics of getting it to the consumer.
This is not strange, or even strange at all. Side benefit in this case, they get the auction entry fee from everyone bidding regardless of whether they win and also a look into who is interested in amassing a large quantity of bitcoins.
Honestly this shouldn't require explanation,
Ice Cream has no bones.
So they can go out of their way to try and stifle information on stingrays, but they can't make the BCC field work?
Don't ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Or maybe a variant thereof. Who knows, maybe people have become so used to social media, that secrecy becomes an afterthought. Maybe the person in charge thought email is just the pre-Facebook version of posting a status update?
Suggestion for three-letter agency recruiters: screen for applicants who aren't Facebook/Twitter/Instagram addicts.
Actually no, these are the idiots who come and seize your property with little suspicion or on the orders of the jackbooted thugs who want your stuff and sell it off without due process. They're the ones what to make your decisions on everything, to make sure that big brother is watching you and taking all of your hard fought earnings all in the name of social justice where your individuality doesn't matter but the collective good does. Of course by collective good that means you don't keep anything you earn.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
> Gold has intrinsic value. Does bitcoin have any? No.
Gold has value because of its physical properties, scarcity, and attractiveness. The Bitcoin Network has value because of the ability to move funds from place to place, just like the UPS network has value for the ability to move packages from place to pace. Gold's source of value isn't better than other sources of value, just different. All value derives from people wanting or needing something, and the supply in relation to demand. Demand for the "bitcoin" token, which is an accounting unit within the Bitcoin Network, derives from the usefulness of the Network. Since the tokens are scarce goods, their exchange value is set by supply and demand. This is similar to how UPS shipping labels acquire value as part of the UPS network. The labels don't have value by themselves, they are just sticky paper with printing on them.
> Real money is guaranteed by the govt. If bitcoin can be considered valid currency, anybody else should be able to create their own currency.
Fiat currency is guaranteed to lose value relative to other goods through overproduction. Fiat means "let it be so", its a government imposed requirement that it be accepted for certain purposes. There are no other guarantees about it. You should read up on private bank notes prior to the Federal Reserve and private currencies since then. People do create currencies all the time, all it takes is enough acceptance in trade for other goods. Look up cigarettes in prisons, Tide detergent in buying drugs, and local currencies used particular towns. In terms of digital currencies like Bitcoin, there are hundreds of alternates, although Bitcoin has over 90% of the total market. It was the first and has the widest acceptance - dozens of exchanges where you can trade them for other currencies, and over 60,000 merchants where you can spend them.
> Credit card companies don't manufacture currency, they just transfer it. Bitcoins are manufactured in transactions.
Banks do in fact manufacture money supply when they make loans, look up "fractional reserve banking". They can then trade some of that money supply for circulating notes and coins (ie paper money). How much is based on customer demand. In the US about 12% of the money supply exists as physical notes and coins. The rest only exists as entries in computerized ledgers *just like bitcoin*. The bitcoin accounting tokens are generated by the accountants (miners) who verify blocks of transactions. They have to be originally distributed somehow, and the chosen method is payment for work done. But this is just an initial distribution situation. Once generated, coins or fractions thereof only move from person to person, and in a few years most of the bitcoins will have been generated, since the distribution algorithm provides half the remaining coins every 4 years, to a max of 21 million total.
Doubtful. Despite the overinflated sense of self importance some people in the BTC community have, the federal government does not care all that much, They just want BTC trading to follow the same rules as other commodities, that is pretty much it.