Bitcoin Forum

Feds to auction 50,000 bitcoins from Dread Pirate Roberts

The U.S. Marshal’s Service on Monday announced a second series of auctions to sell off thousands of bitcoins related to the seizure of the online criminal bazaar known as the Silk Road.


https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/feds-to-auction-50000-bitcoins-from-dread-pirate-roberts/

Was the price at which the Silkroad bitcoins were sold disclosed?  ???

This time around, the U.S. government is likely to fetch less money for each bitcoin than it did in the first round in June, when it sold 29,655 bitcoins for around $18 million to venture capitalist Tim Draper. At that time, each unit of the virtual currency fetched around $600, but more recently the price has hovered closer to $380 (Coinbase shows the price at around $400 as of Monday morning ET).

No.

There are still 60,000 after those in the hands of the FBI if I'm not mistaken. I wonder if the market is still affected by these auctions, last time it spiked and then continued to crash.

This may be a good chance to get a bulk amount of coins at a bargain price. It will be a closed bid. If I remember correctly, last time Draper won all of them. So he must have bid high.

yep, it was Draper.

---

http://www.coindesk.com/us-marshals-auction-50000-bitcoins-seized-ross-ulbricht/

50 000 Bitcoins FED Auction

The price took a BIG dive, last time this happened and picked up, when ALL coins was bought in one go by Tim Draper.

You will not have to get it at discount at the auction, it's going to be dirt cheap anyways for a while.  ;)

Perhaps the price will keep on diving, but what if people learned what to expect from the last auction and start driving the price up because they anticipate another rally similar to the one after the last auction?

The price rebounded after the auction, when it became clear that the winner was not going to dump it in the market.

Do the Marshals take bitcoin as deposit?

Is his encrypted wallet still in his control? The one with what 600.000 btc in it?

Were I him I would serve my sentence, 600.000 BTC is a good paycheck for ~20 years. + You can read and stuff in prison.

aha, good news ! A bunch of riches gonna rush for bitcoin  ;D

Dont be stupid. You think FED would let you go that easy? They can just tell all the inmates you're holding hundreds of millions in your brain. You will be a living hell.

I can't say where I got my source, but the best deal they offered Ross ulbricht was 30 years, that would make him roughly 60 when he got out, he doesn't have too much to lose by fighting it as I dont see him getting much more (if any) than that if hes found guilty. All he needs is to get one juror to have reasonable doubt, hes a good looking guy and has a great attorney, (as he bats his eyes to the total babe in the jury box) I totally see him beating at least some of the charges. but after NY, he has to go fight the murder for hire and other charges in Maryland, those charges will not run concurrently to the NY sentence If hes found guilty. Most likely, most of the charges in NY will run concurrently if convicted, but not all.

ross had 144k total outstanding coins, so after this 50k they will still have 94k coins to sell. Both sides agreed to this sale, they will fight for the cash it after the trial. They chose to sell the coins because of the volatility of BTC... I didn't know that there was 600 btc not accounted for. he needs to figure out how to get those coins to his family to help pay for his trial, but I bet that he didn't plan for this so they actually might be lost forever unless he remembers his password, my money is on that he had his password encrypted on the confiscated computer, so I doubt those 600 coins will do him much good, might be wrong, lol..

If I were in his shoes, Id probably fight the charges too, even if I was guilty as hell. But, the govt has screwed up many times, so, they might sweeten the deal before the trial starts. If they offered anything under 20 years, he should take it in a heart beat..

Any link to the address with the 600 btc?

So they did have the private keys after all
Remember that one was in question for a while either that or they finally filtered through all that data and figured it out
Still hot damn that is a lot of money

Are you talking about 600 btc or 600 K btc, as above mentioned? Typo ? It is quite a difference

AFAIK, the Govt had 2 sets of coins, the first set were the coins that were on the SR site, in vendors and buyers wallets, those coins have been auctioned off. the other set of 144k coins were Ross' private coins that werent tied to SR. This is the first time I've heard of another wallet that contains 600btc, if it were on the same computer/wallet that the 144k coins were on, im sure the govt has them or they are apart of the 144k. It would be interesting to know if he still has coins that the govt doesn't control. 600 is still a shit load of coins.....

All those bidders who returned empty handed will certainly be interested in this batch. I hope this will pull the prices up closer to $500.

It will be interesting Tim has his amount
But if he went back in for round 2  ;D
Might get some serious bidding in there just as a way of getting back at them
Although this time I doubt they will leak all the parties that are bidding in an e-mail haha

Yeah, 600 bitcoins isn't much when there were 50k+++ elsewhere.

600k, I never heard that number except as a total that flowed through SR.

600.000 is what DPR has , they managed t get https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH 144.000 of them,.....
they rest DPR still has....
also check DPR siezed coins 2

How many coins does DPR still 'have' that are not under the Fed's control? If he doesnt give them all up I'm sure they'll go down on him extra hard. Isn't he already looking at life anyway? I imagine they'll want to make an example out of him seeing as this is the first case.

There were much more than 600k bitcoins that went thru silk road 1.. the 114k were ross' and the 29k or whatever were the coins that were in escrow or in vendors or buyers accounts. On average, SR1 did about 10-15k dollars worth a day in gross PROFIT, he took between 2-8 percent roughly as a commission, so you do the math on how many coins went thru silk road... So the site was roughly transacting about 50-100k dollars worth of bitcoin a day. Granted, when he started it, the numbers were pretty low, but they started to skyrocket due to the news article that happened about 6 months after opening. Gawker, i believe.

I would venture to guess that hundreds of thousands to millions of bitcoins flowed thru silk road, obviously it depended on the bitcoin price at the time, so when it was taken down, the bitcoin flowing thru was much less, than it was a year earlier..