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"The trial of alleged Silk Road ringleader Ross Ulbricht took a surprising twist today when a witness from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently claimed that Mark Karpeles, former CEO of the embattled bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, was once suspected to be the black market's mastermind, Dread Pirate Roberts."

Source: http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-ceo-mark-karpeles-implicated-silk-road-trial/



What do you think guys ?

I don't know; how many times did Silk Road crash?

Well they lost coins didn't they? :D

LoLz... DPR did not loose any coin.

So the head of the largest Bitcoin exchange in history--which also served as a BTC bank of sorts for more than any other entity in history--was the man behind the largest black market site in history? Well, at least it was associated with Magic: The Gathering. At least that part's not criminal!

Was there any proof to the claim, or was it just a claim to get his money back from mtgox :P ?

Most of the big exchangers are the same. That's why they will be closed. The ones from USA like BitPay and Coinbase very soon.

Give that agent a fucking medal!!!

I would love to see them pin everything on Karpeles, not going to happen, but would be very nice for a lot of people.

On a side note, a friend of mine wrote me a letter saying that he plays magic the gathering in jail, so Karpeles would be a king lol

So do you know Tony? He's a great guy and a savvy businessman. And have you been out to SF to see Coinbase. Great location huh?
Now why would these successful companies close? They have tens of thousands of happy customers.   

And from where they got this smart conclusion ? That witness is just claiming tho ? Or he got at least some proofs

Lotsa proof, he said. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/defense-in-silk-road-trial-says-mt-gox-ceo-was-the-real-dread-pirate-roberts

Interesting theory. Dred Pirate Roberts left some clues behind that defines his unique tastes:
1. He had a flair for articulate writing. Even posts regarding updates had a formal style. Whoever it was, they had attractive leadership qualities. He was a hero and never wrote anything slang or youthful. Just like a true CEO or what you'd expect a leader to write. He had grace during the most challenging times in the market's history.

2. Book club. DPR hosted a Solk Road book club and actively participated in it and recommended books to read. It was obvious this club was just to spread his views and generate hype over Libertarianism. His Favorite books were mostly related to politics, economy, Libertarians, history of Libertarian in Europe, etc.

3. He was certainly not young or American.
I recall some British style English. Although, he did write how he changes his writing style to foil writing style algorithms.

4. Crypto crazy. He was a master of encrypyion tools & Bitcoin. Always recommending tools and updates in posts. Signed with his PGP key always.

5. He was a bad coder. His posts regarding PHP code was often criticized by users who were more versed coders. However, he was an excellent writer, very technical on economics. Never did he mention anything about pop culture. Like he was older or isolated.

There's more.

Because they are ALL outlaw. they are not MSB as it is required.

I mean, other "stupids" must be registered as MSB by paying bonds, taxes, audits, waiting for months to get the license and some "smart and great guys" like this "Tony", NOT.

According to the FINCEN:

" a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency."

It's just a matter of time until all the so called exchangers will be closed.

SilkRoad had thousands of happy customers too. Does it matter? They are behind the bars now.

Do you remember Bitinstant? Bitinstant owner (Charlie Shrem ) pleads guilty to operating unlicensed money transmitting business. Do you want more examples?

What is the difference between BitInstant and Coinbase, Bitpay, Kraken? NONE !

Good.  Hopefully they throw the books at him.  How he's a free man still investing up til now escapes me.

But just like OJ simpson, you can commit murder once and get away with it, but you'll eventually eff' up again and reap what you sew.

Of course they are.  The information is public record so it should be easy to disprove
http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstateselector.html

Coinbase follows KYC rules of being a money transmitter whether it applies to them or not.  Bitinstant made the mistake of linking to silkroad.  You ask whats the difference?  Evidently alot which includes a court case and jail time.

Wow this is some crazy news headline right here!

Just when you think you know every angle of the story, they hit you with the plot twist.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/dhs-believed-mt-gox-ceo-might-silk-roads-secret-mastermind/

The moral of the story.  Never trust a French man, they're all coward shady dishonorable scumbags!

MagicalTux = Dread Pirate Roberts

https://i.imgur.com/6BiiAax.jpg

Being licensed means that you, as company is supervised by a gov authority. You have to respect MANY aspects as being financial institution.

 You can have as many KYC rules you want. If you are NOT licensed as MSB, you  will be arrested sooner or later.

There XXXX examples of people who received jail sentence for Unlicensed Money Transmitters.

BUT being MSB, you cannot deal with anonymous systems/transactions like Bitcoin. This is the law.

Remember, Bitinstant owner, Bitcoin Foundation's member (Charlie Shrem ) was arrested and HE pleads guilty to operating unlicensed money transmitting business. He will be in jail for 2 years.

How is Coinbase, Kraken or Bitstamp different than Bitinstant? There are NOT so they are facing the same faith.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2skgcr/i_was_at_the_ross_ulbricht_silk_road_trial_day_3/

This redditor claims to have been at the trial today and is answering questions.

i think what we need is a true decentralized exchange all dealing with a decentralized, pegged bit.USD (or any fiat) implementation. something that the govt. would need to shut the internet down to stop its services.

save us cody wilson, amir taaki, peter todd.

I could see Karpeles following the same pattern as OJ.

OJ was never convicted for murder but his bad
karma led him to more bad decisions and robbing
a store, and ended up in jail just the same.

Karpeles never got caught for the Gox theft
(even if you believe it wasn't theft, it was
at minimum criminal negligence)... but maybe
gets skewered for Silk Road.

In any case, the harm he did to investors
is probably far greater than what DPR did
in running Silk Road -- actually I think DPR
probably helped reduce drug violence.

And that my friends is called "reasonable doubt"! Looks like Ross might have a shot after all!

And this could easily explain the Mt. Gox lost coins. They couldn't get to them because the government had seized them, or at least a good portion anyway.

Maybe that was the "big news" that Adam guerbuez declared in one of his tweet (but I'm not sure). Will this news affect the price or not? What do you think ?

I don't see how the news alone would. But him selling the coins might .

Some people might have known this, before the price "collapse" and dumped a lot of coins.

Things are picking up again, so it was not a big train smash or the "Doom" or "Death" of Bitcoin as was predicted by the Shills / Trolls / ButtF$%'ers  ;)

Need. Popcorn.  ;D

Didn't expect that kind of a twist. I wonder if Karpeles is also behind the collapse of the Euro and farting most of world's greenhouse gas emissions  ;D

Good attempt by Ulbricht's lawyers, it might actually work out for their client.

I would personally doubt that any reasonable doubt comes from the allegation that Mark was DPR. I would personally say that it would be much more likely that he is found guilty and then evidence used against him is found to be inadmissible because of 4th amendment claims.

Wow...so nobody actually read the article?


The agent said that he had considered Mark Karpeles might be running Silk Road because it would be a good way to keep the Bitcoin price under control.


So, an agent has a theory a long time ago, backed up by his own opinion for a short amount of time.


The defense is trying to create reasonable doubt. That is like having a murder trial and asking "did you have any other suspects? Oh, you suspected the husband!?!...very interesting...."

.... Wait , wait ... and if karpeles is satoshi  ;D .  Guys  , we should wait an huge pump , very soon!

We suspected the entire family and had them under observation for months whilst the crimes were being committed. ;)

ha, one can hope. karmic justice in a round about way...

haha i hope so, i dont like how hes been avoiding questions this whole time, i want the truth please

bitcoin.....never a dull moment

This is what I was thinking.


Keyword suspected. His name just probably came up after a FBI brainstorming of possible DPR suspects.


Now that would be interesting. It could be possible that he was involved somehow or at least DPR talked with Kerpales before or during the creation of Silk Road.

I don't think he is the real "pirate" behind the silkRoad,  but I'm not sure.

To be fair, Mark was not "implicated" he was briefly "suspected" of being DPR. If you look at the evidence collected it is Ross who has some explaining to do.

Yes , now I've seen. A simple question : Do you think he  is the mind behind silkRoad ? Maybe he was in the "team" but not the "creator" ad "manager" of SR (That's for sure).

I really don't know? But to be honest I see no evidence of a connection. There is some very damming evidence against Ross though. I does, however, seem like the volume of sales at SR and the dominance of Gox as an exchange must have brought the two into some kind of contact. Maybe not criminal, but there was a lot of BTC being cashed out by SR. It does stink a little.

Me too , it is very strange. Maybe they have cooperated for "cashout" the bitcoin. We will see how the situation will evolve.

If this turns out to be real I think it will be a bad hit for bitcoin enviroment

Ahem, Karpeles behind bars can't be bad for bitcoin ;D.

Well, I want the Karp deep fried...but my other early adopter friends do think it will DESTROY btc is he's implicated....or even associated with SR and DPR.

At one point there was some uncertainty on how much of bitcoin's value was due to SR. You see, SR fell and all the price did was take a dip to $85, that was quickly resolved. Today the bitcoin economy is much larger, I bet Karpeles being busted won't make a dent in the price.

Apart from the risk that wallets with hundred of thousands of BTC are seized with him and auctioned and/or dumped.

Interesting post at the bottom of the original article mentioned in the first post:



And who was and still is controlling Karpeles? You only get one guess who is in possession of those stolen coins now and it ain't Karpeles. And the purpose of gaining control of those coins was played out in front of our eys over the past 3 days. And being the true parasites they are they let the victim live for a while longer to obfuscate their trail.

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    Steve Goku sjs • 2 days ago

    Could you please elaborate? I'm very interested in what you said.
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        sjs Steve Goku • 2 days ago

        Karpeles maintains it was an inside job and the Japanese police says the same thing.

        Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun quoted “sources in the Metropolitan Police Department” as saying that only 1% of the bitcoins, or about 7,000 BTC, reported missing by the exchange were lost due to cybertheft. The vast majority of the missing 650,000 bitcoins most likely disappeared “after the system was fraudulently operated by an unknown party.”

        Which agency planted who at Mt Gox and was this plant the inside party that took posession of the coins? The agency that the individual worked for now controls the coins.

        The emergence of decentralised crypto currencies is a threat to the established world order (money system) and if it can't be brought under control, must be destroyed.

        The process is started by steadily shorting BTC's and applying selling pressure supported by shorting 'jolts' on low volume or low activity trading days like public holidays. Bots will assist by triggered resistance levels being broken followed by further selling.

        Unlike Gold, there are no sovereigns to put a floor under BTC's. The same attempts were made in the Gold and Silver markets over the past 3 years+

        The victim (Bitcoin) is allowed to recover - that would be the present.

        The scenario will repeat itself until the mission is accomplished at a very low $ investment. Control is retained by the incumbents.

        Please note: all the above is pure fiction for your entertainment only.

I would argue that the price quickly rebounded after SR was taken down because so many people realized that you could buy illegal drugs relativity safely with bitcoin, so they did.

I would say that if Karpels was still running gox then him being implicated would be very bad for bitcoin's price however now that gox has been shut down for over a year tha should really not be an issue

Bitcoin > mark k

Bitcoin > Satoshi

Bitcoin > SR

Bitcoin > DPR

Nuff said

Being global, local holidays are not too much of a risk. There's not all that many that are international, and when they are, half the world still doesn't recognise them.

I was in the courtroom on Wednesday and Thursday.  The jurors appeared bored with the direct examination, most were fighting just to stay awake.  The exception was when Mr. DerYeghiayan started talking about what was on Mr. Ulbricht's laptop when he was arrested and what scraps of paper were found in his bedroom trash can.  The jurors appeared very interested those two times.  

During cross examination the jury was awake and interested in everything being said.  Just from my observation the defense's strategy seems to be working.  You have an agent testifying about how he was able to assume multiple different identities online and take over the moderator account "cirrus" without being detected so how can they then argue that there was only one DPR and Ulbricht was it?  Keep in mind that Karpeles wasn't just a suspect, the agent believed he had probable cause to search Mr. Karpeles' email accounts.  

The defense also poked many holes in the prosecution's case.  The agent did not know exactly when the buyers and sellers guides were posted.  The agent did not know when the escrow and commission system was started.  The agent did not know when the bitcoin tumbler was started.  The agent did not know when hacking equipment and software was first sold on Silk Road.  These questions seem to imply that the defense is going to, as they already have, readily admit that Ulbricht had a hand in starting Silk Road but it is these features that add the damaging money laundering, conspiracy, and hacking charges.

The agent also insisted that he thought DPR was male but he also admitted that he was surprised to find out that the original "cirrus" was female.  The defense also brought up how the price of bitcoin jumped up to over a thousand dollars immediately after Ulbricht's arrest.  Since Mt. Gox's trading bots may have been the reason behind that price increase expect the defense to make the case that Ulbricht was set up as the fall guy so that Karpeles could benefit from that rapid price increase.  This was not brought up in the courtroom but I wouldn't be surprised if it is brought up later.

The Bitcoin Talk forums were also brought up on Thursday.  The defense is going to say that Karpeles created the Bitcoin Talk forums.  And both the Bitcoin Talk forums and the Silk Road forums not only use the same software but the exact same version of the software even though other versions have come out.  The defense will also make the point that this software is not commonly used to make online forums.    

Hard to say what will happen but if the coins get seased and feds sell it then its going to be a free for all with cheap and cheaper coins and could have some serious falls like it already is. Who knows what the future holds but right now 2015 don't feel too good for prices going anywhere other than down.

Agent DerYeghiayan himself stated during the investigation that he thought that DPR had changed at least once and he was frustrated by not being able to be sure if the screen names he was talking to were the same persons throughout.  He even said "Who's on first?" at one point during the investigation.  He also noticed that DPR was offline for two days prior to Mr. Ulbricht's arrest which was an unusually long time for DPR to be offline.  He also noticed that there was an account called "PeaceLoveHarmony" that was sitting on DPR's profile for over two hours which was unusual behavior.  Yeghiayan thought that "PeaceLoveHarmony" could be law enforcement so he asked all his colleges if it was them and they all said no but it could have been law enforcement from another team unrelated to his investigation.

How many BTC did you lose?

Do you mean in the Gox's "crack" ?  I personally didn't lost anything ...but there are a lor of users that weren't lucky.

It's terrible but that actually made me lol.

His main worry throughout the investigation was that some other law enforcement was going to screw it up.  DerYeghiayan was furious with other agents for seizing Karpeles' websites and meeting with his attorneys.  He was afraid to tip Karpeles off that he was a target in the Silk Road investigation.  The defense's story will likely be that Karpeles found out they were closing in on him on Silk Road and set up Ulbricht to save his own skin.   

if they were more interested in cross examination then the cross examination is likely going to have a greater impact on them. A very good point was made that the agent was able to assume multiple online identities - this should raise doubt in the prosecution's case. 
This is a somewhat of a step in the right direction however the government is going to have more witnesses and can present evidence to show when this all happened (although they might not have access to the forum servers as it was not taken down when Silk Road was taken down).
 
Karpeles didn't create bitcointalk? It was started by satoshi and sirus.

Everything blamed on mark k might be great actually.  Soon people going to slowly understand that this doesnt change anything about bitcoin itself.

This would be possible, but I don't think mark would be smart enough to pull something like that off.

I was also under the impression that DHS seized Gox's US bank account was a way to try to get them to strengthen their AML policies to make it easier to find when people from SR were selling on gox as it was believed that many were (at least this is what I remember from MSM news reports at the time)

if "you" say that it is possible only because the defense's mention Mark Karpeles as being "the pirate" then you have to say that  the defense's mention of Mark Karpeles's ownership of the site Bitcointalk.org too :)

In the beginning he has hosted bitcointalk.org ( and this is why he has got the "VIP" rank) , read this post :

I don't know if he was the real DPR, or if he was involved in Silk Road in any way.

BUT I JUST LOVE TO PUT ANY KIND OF BLAME ON THAT FAT SUCKER SCAMMER! HE WAS THE ONE !!

:D

*round of applause*

I don't think there would be much proof to implicate him. But would have been nice if some solid evidence had emerged.

Yes , at the end (maybe) he is not implicated in the SilkRoad story. ... but I'm not sure. Let see what will happen here, it would be funny if karpeles was satoshi http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/nonciclopedia/images/1/13/Asd.gif/revision/latest?cb=20071018154810.

I am not 100% sure why (it may have been because he was hosting the forum), but the FBI at one point thought that MK had owned bitcointalk.

As much as I would love to see MK go to jail, I somewhat doubt that he will because of any involvement in silk road

Don't insult Satoshi!  :D

Yeah..anyways I dont think Karpeles is smart enough to be even considered close to satoshi..if he was..he would have avoided jail altogether!

never ends with these guys..

The evidence the government had that Mark was the owner of Silk Road was similar to the evidence that he owned bitcointalk. He hosted both sites for some period of time. Although this does give some level of connection it is not a definitive connection (although it could explain why he was unwilling to be interviewed in the US). It could potentially create some level of reasonable doubt in the Jury's mind