Bitcoin Forum

We all know about the silk road story and USG seizing 144.000 coins from DPR and some 30k coins from the market place.

I've got two qestions:

How many of those coins are still not auctioned?
Are there any other stories of governments owning bitcoins?

there is this article on Ibtimes : http://www.ibtimes.com/worlds-biggest-bitcoin-wallet-owned-us-government-1514100
this is the adress here https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH but they are moved as you can see , most likely they don't own anything as goverment but maybe individuals on the gouverment do who knows

I doubt the government cares about bitcoin right now on a higher level, only the cops who want to arrest people for this related to it.

 :o

This Transaction! (https://blockchain.info/tx/e696b24eb87e58c546156ead075055c3c27a8a6b2637f19941d58cb7349eb88d)

 :o

That is an old article.
There were some coins auctioned (50k) bought by Tim Draper.

But how many coins are still owned by government?

As far as I know, The Australian Government does not posses BTC. It would be just worthless as it will not spend it on online payments.
It would be just dumb if a government does actually posses bitcoins.

The US government held (maybe still holds) bitcoin that it seized from Silk Road. It has been auctioning them off to buyers for a lot of money. The last one was for 44000 Bitcoin.

What about China? I've heard rumors that the Chinese government is actually secretly buying up bitcoins to prepare themselves a good position once all fiats fail. I think, that there is little, if any truth to this, but there is always this slim chance since China is leading this race by every means.
All in all I think that China and USA are the only ones actually holding any bitcoins and seeing that USA auctioned so many of them, I think that they don't really know what to do with them.

OP, Great question!

Any government would be a fool not to devote some resources (quietly) to Bitcoin, in the hopes that it earns them a profit. This would be especially true if the Government was able to obtain ownership for free.

I disagree with this comment below. Governments are very willing to confiscate all that is valuable, you better believe that if they've been able to legally confiscate bitcoin, they've done so and kept some.

I think the last Silk Road coins have been auctioned, but not the coins from the Silk Road 2.0 and the other dark markets seized in US. I don't know if other countries have seized coins too.

But I don't know if the govs really own the seized coins, because they can't use them at will, they will have to sell the coins first to use the funds.

Officially no government owns BTC that they can directly spend, as far I know, but of course we never know what happens behind the curtains, specially in China and other authoritarian countries

How much coins were seized from SilkRoad 2.0 and the rest of the deep net markets? If the number is over 10K we'll probably see them auctioned them again, if they indeed hold the coins.

Definitely more than 10k was seized in all of the darknet market busts. Silk Road itself had 144K BTC seized from the site by the US government.

I think the government of US is holding multi-million dollars worth of bitcoins. Which is quite a lot.

I think the MtGox coins are held by the Japanese government, and they exceed the amount seized from the Silk Road. There is a lawyer in charge of dealing with the claims for them but I don't know who is holding them. It must be an arm of the Japanese government because it wouldn't trust a member of the public with them.

Yeah, i'm pretty sure the Australian government doesn't poses Bitcoin. There has been a post on this forum about the Chinese government possessing Bitcoin but I am not too sure whether that is true.

I don't believe any government is holding any for their own ends, just stuff that's been confiscated that'll be disposed of in due course. As ever Bitcoiners are overestimating how much of a shit the rest of the world gives. That might not be a fashionable view but I have never courted fashion.

I think that The Authorities which had the bitcoins of Silk Road have sold those all. I think even that the Government of USA have not bitcoin and don't care to have bitcoins. Are nothing for their needs. Have any interest to have such kind of currency. They have the us dollar through which they rule all the actual monetary world. They can use the us dollar to have everything they want and they can have as much us dollar as they want. Why care for bitcoin which is nothing for them and is known yes or not from only less of 1% of the world population?

I do not think government owns any bitcoin. The Japanese authority "owns" bitcoin on behalf on Mt Gox victims.