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Winners of First Seized Silk Road Bitcoin Auction Remain Anonymous
ASDFnz (472824) writes with news that the first block of bitcoins seized from the Silk Road have been auctioned off, and for a pretty high price. The winners are unknown, and Bitcoin has bumped from trading at ~$600 to $650 (USD). From the article: ...In the absence of information speculation both on the markets and on the Internet is building. First Barry Silbert, Founder of SecondMarket and BitcoinTrust has tweeted that they were outbid on all blocks. Since then Alex Walters (a former core Bitcoin developer and the then chief technology officer of Bitinstant) has posted on reddit saying 'I Lost' in his $400 to $500 per coin. That post was closely followed by another reddit user saying that his bid of $451.13 per coin was also unsuccessful. ... Meanwhile the actual price of bitcoins of the various exchanges has risen close to 15% from just under $600 a coin to close to $650. In the end, we may never know who bought the confiscated coins or how much they bought them for but it does seem that it will be a pivotal point in Bitcoin's evolution.
Why didn't they just sell these bitcoins at a regular exchange?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Newegg.com now accepts bitcoins, which I suspect is at least as important for the rising prices in the last few days.
...Apparently with BitCoin, the more uncertain and insecure the news, the higher the exchange rate.
Shouldn't 'uncertainty' and 'risk' be detrimental to the value of anything that is subject to it, instead of increasing it? It appears to me that BitCoin is one of the most irrational products of technology of recent times. Probably even more so then the Metro UI. Or am I overlooking something really really obvious?
There was at least one seller on silk road shipping only legal stuff like glassware. Did he get his coins returned?
If bitcoin was trading at something like $600 beforehand, why would anyone bidding $450 be surprised that they lost out? If these bitcoin boosters are so firm in their belief that bitcoin is as fungible as any other currency, shouldn't they have bid at something like the going rate?
Put differently, if the U.S. was auctioning off a briefcase filled with €100,000, and the exchange rate is presently €1 = $1.37, would anyone be surprised if a hedge fund bidding $1/€ lost out?
Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm curious under what authority the USMS can sell off these coins? Their web site indicate that these coins belonged to "Silk Road" but not to Ross Ulbricht. As far as I know, there was no "Silk Road, Inc." so wouldn't the coins technically belong to Ulbricht or whoever owned / leased the seized servers? Without any kind of corporation Ulbricht would be, in essence, the "sole proprietor" of Silk Road. And if that's the case, how can the marshalls sell off his property without a conviction? It seems like selling his property now is a violation of due process. But then... IANAL.
Somebody should probably get out their protractor and see if the Winklevoss twins are smirking slightly more than usual today, that might be informative...
CIA, FBI, NSA etc all need the coins to be able to trap criminals and non criminals in to trades that can be later used to prosecute them and everyone else involved.
it is Extremly Very Good
It would be funny if the buyers used them to buy drugs.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Since it's a big volume, picking one particular exchange would disturb the price of Bitcoin temporarily. That's why they decided to auction them instead. They could have sold it to the market, but to be wise the would should to sell like 10 BTC per hours unless they willing to go into [bigger] Chinese exchanges... The beauty of bitcoin is that you don't need clearing house, exchange or bank. You can trade them directly.
"...but it does seem that it will be a pivotal point in Bitcoin's evolution."
Why? This has nothing to do with the technology itself, nor regulation or adoption of that technology, nor has the price been pushed up to anything beyond what it has been before. The government seized some assets, and then auctioned them off.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
are good friends of governer Jerry Brown?
Maybe he/she wants to use them to anonymously get some of that sweet Sudanese blood money, after their bank was smacked with a fine for violating sanctions. The demand for money laundering will be even greater now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
We do know they won't be using MTGOX as an exchange...
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Another possibility is that the winner is lying about losing. I know personally that I wouldn't want to be known for winning that auction.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
It probably isn't practical, because there are ways to anonymize coins, such as Dark Wallet. But if bitcoins could be black listed, then they would no longer be fungible. Therefore, any company who attempted to do this would probably be shunned by the bitcoin community. In short, a blacklist maintained by "the powers that be" is fundamentally incompatible with the philosophy of a decentralized currency such as bitcoin.
And in doing so, they acknowledged that bitcoins have value and can be auctioned. This is the government implicitly declaring that bitcoins are real property, rather than worthless tokens in the latest online nerd-game.
The US government already declared that bitcoins are real assets that experience a gain or loss in value. The IRS says that people must record such a gain or loss since the time of coin acquisition until the coin is sold or spent. In other words you have to calculate a gain or loss every time you buy a coffee with bitcoins.
When this Ponzi scheme collapses the SEC will have to investigate the United States Marshals Service.
Should make for interesting spectating.
The claim "we may never know who bought the confiscated coins" is wrong.
The original address of these bitcoin is well documented, so they are be easily traced once they are transfered.
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1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw
Definitely. That is easy to do. However since each transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs, the set of descendants is likely to grow over time, until eventually most bitcoins are descendants of that transaction.
If there isn't any consensus in the "community", then such a blacklist is unlikely to have any effect.
If some miners decide to blacklist transactions involving certain coins, then other miners are just going to pick them up. If only a minority of miners are in on the blacklisting, then this is going to cause a fork in the blockchain. Other miners have to decide, which fork they are going to bet their resources on. If there isn't consensus on what to blacklist, there could be so many forks blacklisting different subsets, that each fork is going to become irrelevant leaving only the chain with no blacklisting as viable.
Even if you could manage to get a majority of miners to agree on exactly what should be blacklisted, it is of questionable value to the miners to attempt blacklisting. It could be seen as introducing a dangerous precedence for introducing blacklists. This would introduce a new and even more unpredictable danger to anybody owning bitcoins.
Traders could decide to blacklist certain bitcoins. This would mean you would refuse to accept blacklisted coins. But if you are selling goods for bitcoins, then you'd have to announce in advance, which coins you consider blacklisted, otherwise you'd have disputes where the buyer of goods says they have paid, but seller of goods says the received bitcoins are no-good. And as receiver of bitcoins you'd also have to decide how diluted the blacklisted bitcoins would have to be, before you'd accept them. And in all, there'd have to be consensus about both the set of blacklisted bitcoins and the dilution threshold. Otherwise nobody will know, if the bitcoins they are accepting are good or not, and without such knowledge blacklisting wouldn't have the intended effect, instead you'd just be rejecting arbitrary payments, you might as well flip a coin and say no-thanks to a certain payment.
I think the only consensus that has a real chance of being reached is that bitcoins are not blacklisted.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?