Bitcoin Forum

http://www.coindesk.com/tim-draper-revealed-silk-road-bitcoin-auction-winner/

Pioneering venture capitalist Tim Draper, father of noted bitcoin industry VC Adam Draper and managing director of the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has been revealed as the winner of last Friday’s US Marshals auction of nearly 30,000 BTC.

The announcement was released via a blog post on Medium issued by California-based bitcoin trading and storage startup Vaurum. Draper was previously named as an investor in the company’s $4m seed funding round this May, along with AOL CEO Steve Case and others.

In the post authored by Vaurum CEO Avish Bhama, the company announced that Draper intends to partner with Vaurum to use the roughly 30,000 BTC to provide bitcoin liquidity in emerging markets.

Draper said:

“With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies.”

The news follows the US Marshals 1st July announcement that one unnamed bidder had claimed all 10 of the auction blocks.

Nice, so it isn't a speculator hoping to make a quick buck...this is a strategic reserve purchased to back Vaurum.

Good read here: https://medium.com/@vaurum/tim-draper-wins-govt-auction-partners-with-vaurum-to-provide-bitcoin-liquidity-in-emerging-markets-88f04a1d8598

Another recommended read from the Vaurum site: The tech world's ethical crisis (https://medium.com/@piewords/the-tech-worlds-ethical-crisis-b441170fef29)

I get excited whenever I see capitalists actually talking about ethics. The world certainly needs more of that.

Tim Draper had this to say:
“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies.
Of course, no one is totally secure in holding their own country’s currency. We want to enable people to hold and trade bitcoin to secure themselves against weakening currencies.”


May I humbly suggest we stop constantly throwing links at Coindesk (news aggregation) and instead link the actual source material?

Coindesk basically takes other people's news and re-posts it with a few words on their own site. it's a shitty, asinine practice and we shouldn't support it.

Excerpt from the article on tech world ethics:

"There have been many claims and debates of the past few days. People are trying to draw absolute boundaries around what is, and is not, ethical. The technical world won’t like this, but that is impossible. Ethics are not absolute. What is considered right one decade can be considered inconceivable in another decade. Just look at the Civil Rights movement and current feminist efforts for women to be treated equally and fairly as lessons in the constantly evolving state of ethics."

This is absolutely fantastic!

I feared that the winner would be some wall street scum with the intention of just setting up some pump and dump toy. But this is IMHO the best case scenario.

You can suggest it but I don't know how many will agree with your
opinion that it's a "shitty asinine practice".  What
makes it so?

News aggregation is a value-add.

I like having my news in one or a few major sites that
have lots of great articles.  Why would I want to
waste time trying to find isolated articles from
all over the place?

Are we supposed to know who this guy is?

Oh fine, I'll leave it alone. It just annoys me because Medium.com is a great site that deserves the traffic, and I don't like to see its traffic being hijacked in this way...

You are now. His company is a Palo Alto do-gooder startup. This is great for Bitcoin and the world.

I was betting on Novogratz from Fortress winning the auction but Draper is a nice alternative.

seems a cool guy

as predicted by most of us would be someone like this and would be held in a fund or for use like this, not sold back onto market

question is, when will the other people interested in buying 30k coins each buy? I assume theyre trying now, buying, drp price buy back some more, rinse repeat

Smart move to buy the coin to get publicity for his start up.

Now we need those who didn't win to release their bid amounts.

Indeed, I'm sure that the extra price he paid for the coins wouldn't have bought him the kind of publicity he gets now. Everyone's a winner  :D

Very bullish indeed.  This is much better than just pure BTC speculation such as SecondMarket.  Putting the sale to use for services and publicity is a much better investment for all.

Great news indeed
His son runs that bitcoin incubator, if memory serves

Wait so what was the price in which he bought the bitcoins for?

Undisclosed, I suspect market or slightly above

Very nice!

I'm sure over time we will find out from those who participated in the auction.

I was hoping the people at the auction would somehow get lucky and no one would bit past $300 a bitcoin, just for the profit of it.

And if no one does, hopefully some sort of market correlation can be made to approximate it.

[Still though, I'm inclined to believe that once bitcoin gains another magnitude of value he'll disclose the price.]

Very nice, lets see if he can do what he plans and bring BTC to emerging economies in an even bigger way.

I suspect you may be right. When BTC is trading at 2500 $ +, no one will gasp at an 800 or 900 per coin auction bid.

Is it?  I just went to the medium.com and its completely unclear
what the site does or what its about it.

Maybe its a great site but I would never know because
they aren't getting their message across, at least to me,
from their home page.  Just my 2 cents on that.

The bigger point about news aggregation:
 
A respectable source makes it clear where the original
source is... and thereby rewards the original source by
giving that source visibility and traffic. 

Think of it this way  -- most people visit the sites
they are familiar with, so its not stealing any traffic
away from the source -- its really doing more of
the opposite and making that source known to
a wider audience.  Sure, a few people get their
news by doing a google news search, but I
think those folks are in the minority.

And I think the way coinbase does it is very
tasetful -- they actually hyperlink back to
Medium.  Not every aggregator does that.

You must be really cross with news.google.com eh? ;) outrageous practice!

LOL Thank god Digg is gone. Crazy idea of reposting what interests people in a specific community.

It will be completely forgotten.

Its not surprising that one man took all the blocks with one bid, selling bitcoin in that way it will sell like hot bread.

That is great news. No pump and dump and no mass of under priced coins dumped for profit taking.

It might be even better news than that.  If you were one of the many big investors who didn't get a single coin, you're still sitting on all your money and probably still want to buy some bitcoins.  They'll now have to do it the old fashioned way.  Either peer to peer, or from an exchange.  The extra demand should hopefully prove positive.  Then there's the extra press coverage too.  As unexpected outcomes go, I don't think it could have gone any better.

The only losing bidders I could find who were prepared to give an indication of how much they bid all said they bid below market price. They all wanted cheaper bitcoins than they could buy on an exchange. Why would they now want to buy millions of dollars worth off exchanges at full price?

I guess the obvious answer would be that they don't have any other choice unless they want to invest in some mining hardware instead.   That or possibly wait for if or when the next auction comes for the remaining coins.  But again they'll have to raise their bids if they don't want to lose out again next time, so it's not like they'll be getting any tremendous bargains.  Auctions always attract people looking for a good deal, but I don't think cheap bids are going to win when there's lots of savvy investors around to grab them at a more reasonable value.

Wow, what a potentially beautiful thing Draper did. I have imagined that Bitcoin will be a way of transferring wealth to the developing world.
But how to get it there before the price explodes. Well, if Draper is thinking what I am, then Kudos to him. Amazing.
Looking forward to how they work this out.

Vaurum is a startup w 2 guys.  No need to get excited

Has anyone calculate about how much the BTC price would rise if one were to buy 30,000 BTC across the biggest exchanges?
I'm wondering about how the bidders calculated the premium on the bids.

Watching the livestream, took a little time to get it running, but seems smooth now.  Did he really just say "Satoshi Nakamura"?  Heh.  Sounds a little less reassuring than it did at first.  I guess being a venture capitalist means you're looking at the figures rather than the folklore, so I'll forgive such an egregious faux pas.   ;D

Everything else he's saying sounds bang on message, though.  


//EDIT:  He's not revealing how much he paid in the auction.   ;D

Should we sit him down with Dorian to get a lesson about that.. :D

Thanks for the link ...watching it now ...either the sound quality is bad or Mr. Tim Draper speaks at a very low voice :)

Just for some perspective regarding my question before. To purchase 5000 coins on stamp would move the market around $50, from 650 to 700.
So, to buy 30,000 coins (even spread across a few exchanges) would probably move the market $100 easy.

And companies like Bitpay, etc. are probably making a nice premium selling their BTC's to large pockets.

IAS

"In the post authored by Vaurum CEO Avish Bhama, the company announced that Draper intends to partner with Vaurum to use the roughly 30,000 BTC to provide bitcoin liquidity in emerging markets."

You know, that's actually one of the more interesting uses I've heard for bitcoin. It could be very useful in countries like Venezuela which are subject to tight currency controls. In that context, bitcoin's wild price fluctuations could be tolerable.

I can't imagine Venezuela would allow it.