Bitcoin Forum

In a surprising and significant move in the cryptocurrency market, the United States government has transferred an impressive total of 9,825 Bitcoins that had previously been seized from Silk Road.

https://criptoinforme.com/bitcoin/el-gobierno-de-los-estados-unidos-movio-mas-de-9-800-btc-venta-a-la-vista/

What would you like us to discuss here? This is just the U.S. government liquidating some of the BTC's seized from the Silk road and James Zhong, they still have a lot of BTC's left in their possession and they would eventually liquidate them too. It is neither surprising nor significant because the U.S government had already earlier said they'll be liquidating the seized BTC's in several batches, and i don't think it will make any significant difference in the price of BTC as the coins are sold in batches.

The most exciting thing according to the news is, the US government is selling those BTC on Coinbase. Yeah, you heard right, that exchange against which the same governments have opened several cases including with the Binance Exchange.


The amount is huge and I think it will put some effect on the market too but the market is already opened before $30.6 as we can see, the market was opening around $30.6k in the last two days but today it opened around $30.3k which directly indicates the impact of this transaction and maybe this news didn't get that much hype which could create the fud so that's why the effect is lesser than before. And I also heard the news of MT gox too of which I am not fully aware now.

i think they have rescheduled the payment in October. so we might see another downtrend in October. And as you said, these transactions will be made in batches and if the next batch fall into the month of October then we can have another huge downtrend which could retarget $29k again. Or maybe more.

Yes this news is true, just confirmed from another source (https://citytelegraph.com/crypto/102280/btc-price-prediction-today-us-government-moves-almost-10000-bitcoin-a-danger-for-the-market/).

I think this is the reason why the Bitcoin is not able to break its resistance. And this is not the first time the US government is doing this.

This has happened several times, and it will happen to every asset seized by the government, which is to be sold in an auction and publicly, and this is not limited to Bitcoin. Sometimes the government confiscates cars, home appliances, plots of land, and other things, but I wonder why they were sold to Coinbase instead of being auctioned.There is clear cooperation between some federal institutions and Coinbase, and these payments may be liquidity paid by the government in exchange for data exchange from it, or that the auction was conducted internally and Coinbase won the auction.

These auction stories are funny. Someone made a fortune buying bitcoin that was seized from an auction at a price lower than the average price of bitcoin.

Just wondering when we'll hear about chipmixer seized coins.

If you follow the recent news, you will find it more interesting that Coinbase's stock price has also increased sharply since they were sued by the SEC. That's strange, and Coinbase's market share has also increased sharply, in stark contrast to Binance.us, whose market share in the US has shrunk significantly. If the US government doesn't sell bitcoin on centralized exchanges, I don't really know where they can sell it because only centralized exchanges have massive liquidity.


That will definitely affect the market negatively, and I would be more excited than worried because the price drop is an opportunity to buy. It is an opportunity, and we should take advantage of it instead of fearing it.

This is a common practice by governments of all nations not only in the US. Recently the US government authorities showed interest in selling some assets which include bitcoins seized from a fraudster from my country. The Silk Road Bitcoin will be sold to pay the $183 million restitution fine placed on Ulbricht by the court in 2015. In auction sales, the highest bidder gets the opportunity to buy the lot. Maybe Coinbase was the highest bidder that was why the coins was sold to the exchange.

I don't think the impact on the market will be massive. The market will stabilize after a few days. This year is an important year for every investor because of next year's halving so any price drop now is an ample opportunity to buy. This news will not cause FUD to well-informed bitcoiners.

No doubt it is amusing when the government first opens cases against the crypto exchange and then cooperates with them in the sale of bitcoins confiscated from the Silk Road. Such a duality of behavior can't go unnoticed and cause bewilderment. Oh, those double standards.

Where does this information come from that the confiscated bitcoins was sold at a price below the market price?

About the coins confiscated from the chipmixer, I suppose, we will not know soon. Coins from Silk Road are an example of this. How many years have passed since the events of that period, and this story is in no hurry to end.

That is why I asked why such coins are mostly sold in a public auction that has been announced for a while. They are rarely sold privately or without an announcement, because the sale took place for the best price and not for the price of bitcoin in spot market.

These coins are a good opportunity for anyone who wants to buy clean Bitcoin from dirty sources.

In terms of volume, 10,000 bitcoins are less than bitcoins that are traded daily, and therefore will not affect the price. In terms of news, their impact is positive, as these currencies are part of the bad past of bitcoin, which becomes brighter day after day.

If these bitcoins are seized from Silk road, these are proceeds of illegal activities. So US government has every right to liquidate these bitcoins which I believe they will do now. Nothing surprising in here. This is normal. Just like the other assets are liquidated, these bitcoins are probably going to end up in the same state.

But I am more worried about the process of liquidation. If these are sold in the open market, that might bring down the price of bitcoin for some time. I just hope they will not sell it in the open market.

Hmm, maybe this was why Bitcoin is cheaper on Binance US two days ago? This is another price manipulation because I can't help but think why now? They have the chance to sell those Bitcoin when FTX madness was all over the place, or oh ye they will be selling lower, anyway I am not worried or anything, because it's just a few numbers of Bitcoin, this will also pass like nothing happened, I am just glad that Bitcoin can never be in control of any centralized authority, if it's the other way around it will be more serious than what we are seeing right now.

What will later happened after this seizure is that we may not know where the whole story will end through, another interesting question is to which account was this transaction made, there's one thing that we need to understand about government regulation inactivities like this because at the concluding part of it, we will not be there or have the opportunity to hear the last conclusion on the issue because government will always hodl the funds in their account when they should make moves to return those financial assets back to every user affected during the cause of the incident.

I don't think there is something impressive here, I mean perhaps it's just the United States government deemed that they have to sell it.

I still remember though that way before that they have auctions,

https://www.usmarshals.gov/what-we-do/asset-forfeiture/sale-approximately-404158424932-bitcoin
https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/newsroom/news-releases/gsa-announces-latest-cryptocurrency-auction-06082022

So it's a normal thing to do for the government.

They liquidate the seized bitcoins? Wow I had no idea about the US laws and how they regulate the seized money. I am wondering if there are any public records for the sell they make and to whom these bitcoins are sold. I mean would not that create confusion in the bitcoin exchange market since they would be suspected bitcoins and marked from address which was involved in the criminal activities or something like that? How would they mark them green one more time since they are already liquidating it anyways. I don’t see any effect of this on the market because I highly doubt everyone in the world is getting updated about the news like this?

In theory, you are not wrong, but in practice I think it is not that simple because the market is very sensitive to everything, even small news causes bitcoin to be dumped, let alone sell 10k bitcoins. The market is not only moving according to supply and demand, it is still being manipulated, and it is not too difficult for market makers to hype news to create panic in the market. But according to a news I read today, the US government has no intention of selling all those bitcoins at once, they will sell it between now and the end of the year and the number of bitcoins is up to 41k bitcoins, not just 10k bitcoins.

All BTC's are the same, the term tainted comes from governments, so the coins are no longer tainted as it is in their possession. The stolen coins will be declared tainted by the government and custodial exchanges if they are yet to be recovered, but once the coins have been recovered by the authorites and sent to addresses controlled by them, it is no longer tainted and can be sold without any problems.

Are they really that bad in trading that they sell their priced loot when the price is at the bottom?  Why not sell it while hitting the ATH or are they just coordinating with Coinbase for their surveillance?  Coinbase is the custodial for Blackrock's ETF.


That's sort of what it will be. Tim Draper bought some of them from the government and sure it was already clean. The coins don't even need to be mixed but just declared clean.

Government do auction any seized assets in public and I believe that it was coinbase that was the highest bidder or was able to convince the government to sell those bitcoin for them. Sometime,the government might even sell it cheaper than the expected price.

Anything that the government does is clean but when individual does similar thing,it might be called unclean by the government due to some of their policies. As long as it is the government that auctioned out those coins,it isn't a problem because it is legit.

They are not traders, neither are they supposed to speculate with seized and forfeited funds. After stolen funds have been recovered by the government and the proceedings and process that follows are almost complete, they will auction the recovered BTC's, and the winning bidder pays and gets to keep the coins. Though the U.S. government is holding a large amount of BTC's that they have recovered and confiscated, these funds are usually sold in batches and the government is not holding on to it for the purpose of speculating on the price.

Indeed. There are times when people wonder why the government is not auctioning off those seized coins at a particular time when the price is high. When asked about this, Jarod Koopman, the director of the cybercrime unit of the IRS, says, "we don't try to play the market."^[1]

However, this doesn't mean they're completely indifferent to the market. It isn't like they don't care about the market at all. While they don't speculate, they're not totally oblivious of the price either. In the words of Koopman, "we don’t ever want to flood the market with a tremendous amount, which then could have an effect on the pricing component.”^[Ibid.]

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[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/19/what-the-us-government-does-with-its-secret-bitcoin-stockpile.html

Nearly 10,000 Bitcoins (oh, lovely BTC!) previously held by Silk Road have been moved by the United States authorities, drawing a lot of attention. I'm sad the link isn't in our language because I'm missing some delicious details.

So, what's the strategy, dear Gov? Do you want to cash in on Bitcoin's recent price increase, or do you have another chess move planned that we haven't figured out yet? In any case, it strengthens Bitcoin's market standing. This development certainly adds some suspense to the Bitcoin story. The skeptic in me, though, is eager to learn the long-term effects of this massive deal.

The story is on the internet for you to read, this is a link to the story written in English: https://www.google.com/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/news/us-government-doj-moves-nearly-10k-bitcoin-related-to-silk-road-seizure/amp
The U.S. government is only liquidating BTC's they seized from Silk road, it is not a surprise because they already said they would liquidate them in batches, so more sales are even expected to happen. People like to think about conspiracies in anything relating to BTC, but i don't see any conspiracy theory in all these and i don't think there is going to be any long term effects.

every time there is bitcoin confiscated the US government is always liquidating and this has often been done, but this will not have a big impact on the value of bitcoin, and I believe koinbase has a close relationship with the US government so that they can make transactions in that market, and we hope this does not appear big with bitcoin users because the US government also has other problems with the crypto world and as if they want to obliterate the bitcoin market.

It is not surprising that the US government will periodically liquidate the Bitcoin assets it confiscates in this case. And not only this, it seems that they will also liquidate enough of the Bitcoin assets they have confiscated in several cases to be able to pay compensation to related parties. However, as explained in several posts above, the US government liquidates these Bitcoin assets regularly to avoid a massive impact on the crypto market globally. So don't be surprised if the US government will return to liquidating Bitcoin assets in the future.

Well, I can't say anything about the manipulation part because they might have that in mind but I'm pretty sure that they have already decided that they will sell the coins seized in batches and they've also decided the months as far as I remember, so it definitely doesn't have anything to do with the current price because they are not investors who have bought them at a certain price and will wait for a specific price point to sell the coins to get more profits.

If they wanted to sell them at the highest, I'm pretty sure they know about the upcoming halving and they would also know that the market generally goes up during those times, so they could easily just hold them until then and then sold them for a much better price but it's not just about the money for them.

That's not a surprise, any body can move Bitcoin from one place to another, as long you have access to the password or private key towards the assets. Because Bitcoin is a digital currency that is trading in difference cryptocurrency exchange platform with a high demand in the crypto market. And that is good information someone has to buy and hold, before the U.S  start regulate Bitcoin as a means of payment.