2013: The FBI's Plan For The Millions Worth Of Bitcoins Seized From Silk Road

2013: The FBI’s Plan For The Millions Worth Of Bitcoins Seized From Silk Road

Source: Forbes

The FBI initially seized over 26,000 Bitcoins. I asked the FBI spokesperson what the plan is for those cryptocoins. “We will download the Bitcoin and store them,” she said. “We will hold them until the judicial process is over.”

Then what?

“This is kind of new to us,” she said. “We will probably just liquidate them.”[…]

The spokesperson says the approximately 26,000 Bitcoins seized are just the ones that were held in Silk Road accounts. In other words, it’s Silk Road users’ Bitcoin. The FBI has not been able to get to Ulbricht’s personal Bitcoin yet. “That’s like another $80 million worth,” she said, explaining that it was held separately and is encrypted. If that is indeed what he’s holding, that’s close to 600,000 Bitcoin all together or about 5% of all Bitcoin currently in existence.[…]

Thanks to the transparency of the Bitcoin block chain, you can actually see that the FBI Bit-seizure has already happened. Reddit has located what looks to be the FBI’s Bitcoin wallet; there’s an influx of 27,000 Bitcoins into it starting on Wednesday, October 2. Someone has helpfully edited the blockchain information for the wallet so that its name is “Silkroad Seized Coins.”[…]

I asked the spokesperson if users of Silk Road could try to recover the Bitcoins in their now-seized accounts.

She laughed.

“There is not likely to be restitution in this case,” she said. “If they’re knowingly buying something illegal, they can’t get their money back.”