He wrote and open sourced his block parser, then published a script to calculate the taint.  That's pretty good in my opinion.  I'll run those 10 addresses you list and find a baseline from those.


The 28% means that when Silk Road decided they had too much in their hot wallet and should move a few thousand offline, 28% of the coins they moved offline were from pirate's wallet.  Kind of.  It certainly doesn't mean that a pirate lender spent 28% of his interest payment on drugs.  If the coins all came from a single pirate lender then the 28% means that the drug payment was made up 28% of coins from pirate and 72% of other unrelated coins.  Kind of, again.

Several of pirate's lenders receive weekly interest deposited directly into their MtGox accounts and pirate is also thought to have recently been involved in moving large volumes of coins on MtGox.  This would likely lead to any coins moved through MtGox recently having a strong scent of pirate on them.  This could explain why the Silk Road coins are so piratey smelling, even if pirate's lenders aren't Silk Road customers.

A close-up of the recent losses.  The graph shows the result after each block in the blockchain.

A bad night for SatoshiDice - down around 1000 BTC.  It seems there have been a lot of double-spend attempts too.  I wonder if there's a connection between the two things.

Even if it doesn't work, or isn't profitable, maybe it's effective as a denial of service attack against the site, polluting their wallet with transactions which will never confirm.

They're from the blockchain, yes.  It's possible pirate has set up some dummy accounts which he pays interest to each week but which go back into a wallet he controls, but what's the advantage to him of making the scheme look bigger than it actually is?


I didn't realise that.  I thought that withdrawals and interest were separate transactions.

Last week, BS&T paid out 26,000 BTC in interest.

The top tier interest rate is 7%.  Some people get less.  If we assume everyone got 7%, then that means there is 371,428 BTC invested, but since not everyone gets 7%, the true figure is higher.  Also, this doesn't include the people who automatically reinvest their interest.  I've no idea what percentage of the interest is automatically reinvested, but let's assume it's none at all.

Even with these assumptions, the least possible amount invested is 371,428 BTC, or $3,298,280 at the current price of $8.88/BTC.

I tried to do something similar for SealsWithClubs just out of curiosity, but got nowhere. 

I've deposited and withdrawn there several times, but all my deposit and withdraw transactions are dead ends.  I don't know how you did it, but nice job!

I'm not.  I remember somebody already having said that he traced his Silk Road deposit directly to the large address.  This just confirms it for me.

I've been looking at the huge list of transactions to and from the Silk Road wallet, trying to see how they can be making so much, comparing the amount they're able to stash in the large address with the throughput of the wallet, and found:

between Fri Jul  6 20:29:49 2012 and Tue Jul 10 16:26:45 2012 there was  63142.39 in and  58582.22 out;  8000 got stashed in big address

between Tue Jul 10 16:26:45 2012 and Wed Jul 11 18:40:54 2012 there was  26326.63 in and  18640.54 out;  7000 got stashed in big address

between Wed Jul 11 18:40:54 2012 and Thu Jul 12 05:21:21 2012 there was  11764.01 in and   4044.89 out;  7000 got stashed in big address

between Thu Jul 12 05:21:21 2012 and Wed Jul 25 19:32:10 2012 there was 212223.51 in and 203620.82 out; 10000 got stashed in big address

between Wed Jul 25 19:49:16 2012 and Fri Jul 27 18:31:12 2012 there was  36245.63 in and  30816.23 out;  6000 got stashed in big address

i.e. nothing very consistent.  I was hoping to see that a fixed percentage of the throughput was being stashed away, which would make sense if it was commission they were charging.  Probably they're just moving excess coins to cold storage on an ad hoc basis to keep them safe.  It doesn't necessarily represent "profits", just coins they're holding which aren't likely to be needed soon.  The majority of it could well belong to their customers, just sitting around in customer accounts waiting to be spent or withdrawn.

Does anyone remember when the big Silk Road scam happened?  One of their big traders had a "sale" and ended up running off with everyone's money, but when?


But if you had sent them to pirate, the address would be in the "pirate cluster" of addresses.  There are 'only' 1138 addresses in his cluster at the moment.  He once posted that 1PSf86KnLuzM7Ris5kDhTEZwooR3p2iyfV is in the gpumax wallet.  From that znort's code finds 1138 addresses from his live wallet, from which the weekly interest payments are made.

There's an issue that I don't think I mentioned.  It may be obscure enough that it's not worth fixing, but anyway...

Last weekend the Internet here was really slow.  I think because there was a music festival nearby which meant lots more people than usual were sharing the 3G connection I use.  Anyway, I'd hit "Bet" and it would show "Betting" for 5 or 10 seconds while trying to communicate with the server.  If during that 5 or 10 seconds I opened up the "Provably Fair" sub-window, then the display would be corrupted when the cards were eventually dealt.  It's very hard to reproduce now the festival is over, but I guess you can reproduce it by having the test server pause 5 seconds before dealing each hand.

I took screenshots at the time:
  https://i.imgur.com/YtQf1.png
  https://i.imgur.com/pgqZm.png

Notice how the "More Games" subwindow is overlapping the main game window.

It looks like you've addressed both the issues I raised - the "out of money" coming up too soon, and the count not appearing while the dealer plays.

Perfect, thanks! 

According to znort's blockparser code, 1Q6nyjSQ79AAw67xAGHgXxXHRj9erLLqhD is now provably in the same wallet as 24550 other addresses.  I used that list to find whether there was any connection between these addresses and the large 1Dky... address.  There have been 86701 inputs and outputs to/from these 24k addresses, all since 18th June.  It seems the Silk Road wallet must have been reset relatively recently, or we'd see older transactions in the list.

Here's your 0.001 BTC being grouped with a few other silkroad addresses:
  https://blockchain.info/tx-index/13896290

Notice that 1AVMrqGmoJ7Jpjh7FdbHnDwK34VBxtBCcC is an input to the same transaction.  That means that both your deposit address and 1AVMrqGmoJ7Jpjh7FdbHnDwK34VBxtBCcC are in the same wallet - silk road's wallet.

Then look at this transaction:
  http://blockchain.info/tx-index/11928355

It's a big payment to the mystery large address.  1AVMrqGmoJ7Jpjh7FdbHnDwK34VBxtBCcC is one of the contributors.

The most recent two deposits into 1Dky... were also from addresses on the list of 24k silk road addresses obtained using znort's code.

I think that's pretty conclusive proof that the large address is related to Silk Road.

I never saw that before.  Is the forum automatically censoring the Silk Road URL?  I wonder if it's OK to link to the Silk_Road_(marketplace) Wikipedia page, or the google result page for an appropriate search.


Your payment has moved.  I'll see what I can find out from the blockchain.

The thing is, investors have been told where the money is going:


Pirate has also claimed that BS&T isn't a ponzi, so if it is, investors are clearly being mislead:


(there's a better quote somewhere I'm sure but I couldn't find it).

While I agree that BS&T is very likely a Ponzi, the above is in no way a proof.

See http://www.sparknotes.com/math/geometry3/inductiveanddeductivereasoning/section1.html for a description of what you did ("inductive reasoning") and why it doesn't constitute proof.

Also, is it expected behaviour for the lobby window to freeze as soon as I open a table window?  That's what seems to happen every time I open a table; the lobby becomes completely unresponsive, so I can't open a 2nd table, or chat in the lobby chat.

Could just be a problem with WINE of course.

Do you mean it wasn't an error on his part, but on yours?

I just connected - it downloaded and installed updates - and told me it has "player count: 2".  But I see 3 at a table, see below:



Are you not including guests in your player count perhaps?

My method is the same as yours.  The only file editing needed is to set up bitcoin.conf.  You can't use bitcoind to talk to a bitcoin server unless you specify the username and password.  You can do that on the command line if you like, but it's more convenient to put them into bitcoin.conf once and forget about them.

You will have done that once a long time ago and probably forgot about it already, but a new user who didn't use bitcoind before will need to do it before your scripts will work:

Note that the bet doesn't end until October 1 2013, so putting it on red wouldn't be enough.  He's going to have to put it on a number.  Would 36x be enough to last until October?