US Govt Has about $170M in Bitcoins

R

r3p1v

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Nov 17, 2006
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So the Fbi has about 144K coins from the silk road owner and it was just announced the govt seized another 29K from I guess silk road customer accounts?

Anyway, what do you guys think they are going to do with the coins? Open an account on coinbase or some other market and sell them for USD? Or hold some kind of auction themselves, or what?
 


I guess it's time to for you to quit acting like the people on yahoo answers are more stupid
 
having had my livelihood decimated by a simple rider clause on a port security bill in 2008, i find your confidence in the ongoing legality of bitcoin less than assuring.
 
drave said:
having had my livelihood decimated by a simple rider clause on a port security bill in 2008, i find your confidence in the ongoing legality of bitcoin less than assuring.
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LOL; yours involved governments.

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charlesmartel said:
Not sure if that is great news. Doesn't buying BTC from the government sort of kill the anonymity feature of BTC?
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LOL; We ALL know exactly what coins these particular ones are... We always will; they're like celebrity coins, and will be held by collectors in the future.

The anonymity you're talking about must be done on an amount-by-amount basis. Most people don't need their coins to be untraceable so it's not something that anyone worries about unless they're the rare drug seller.
 
lukep said:
LOL; yours involved governments.
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actually, it didn't. it was domiciled in countries beyond the reach of .gov, and .gov broke international law and told those domiciles to go fuck themselves or face the sanctions of .gov no matter what.

if you think your little currency is beyond the reach of .gov, you may be smoking too much colorado gold.
 
mpbiz said:
Sounds like a trap to me.
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Um, you'd think they'd try to trap people doing, you know... Illegal things... first.


charlesmartel said:
Collectors of BTC? lol.
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Why not? The first 50 bitcoins from the Genesis block are certainly more treasured by the bitcoin community than any other coins of the same amount. (I don't know if satoshi spent any of those, but if he did then they are already considered collectors items now.)

In fact any Satoshi mined will forever have a nice premium on them. He definitely traded quite a few of those around in 2010, and we can see where every coin to date was mined right now by looking at the blockchain.


drave said:
if you think your little currency is beyond the reach of .gov, you may be smoking too much colorado gold.
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I'm not saying that the average person can hide their coins from a bunch of thugs with guns showing up at their door.

I'm saying that someone who knows what they are doing will never, ever appear to be in control of any coins that the government might want to steal.

Look into deniability. Only fully digital currencies can be fully deniable.
 
lukep said:
I'm not saying that the average person can hide their coins from a bunch of thugs with guns showing up at their door.

I'm saying that someone who knows what they are doing will never, ever appear to be in control of any coins that the government might want to steal.

Look into deniability. Only fully digital currencies can be fully deniable.
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so what you're saying is that bitcoin is not for the average person. and i'm saying that such an underground mechanism can never be popular enough to take root without getting beaten down by .gov.

great then... an abberation or a smackdown. either way, not noteworthy.
 
drave said:
so what you're saying is that bitcoin is not for the average person.
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True anonymity? Yes. At least until someone codes a more easy way.

The majority of the value in bitcoin? Not at all. Even knowing that every satoshi you spent is being watched by the feds, bitcoin is a FAR more useful currency than any other mankind has ever conceived.


drave said:
i'm saying that such an underground mechanism can never be popular enough to take root without getting beaten down by .gov.
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The jury is out on this theory.

We've got guys like Cody Wilson trying to make wallets both simple enough for your mom to use and Mix coins at the same time to make them almost impossible to trace.

We've got other people working on coins to supplement bitcoin that truly are perfectly anonymous; but we don't yet know how we can tie their price to bitcoin's.

Then we've got ppl working on an "auto group buy" functionality to buy things in mass so people randomly buy things for other people of the same value. (CoinJoin, which is almost finished but sounds stupid to me.)

And then we've even got something called stealth addresses now, that could completely obfuscate where any coin spent from that wallet goes.... And it wouldn't even take a protocol upgrade! -But there are some other problems in the way for now.

So mark my words bro; the bitcoin of today isn't limited to what you learn about today. There are always thousands of projects going on at any given second that could go in new directions with this protocol and add new functionality layers to the top of it that are hard to even conceive yet.

Try not to think of it as a mere currency or even protocol for a currency... It's much more like the entire internet with all its' different applications, from email, to browsing, to tweeting to voip, to youtube, etc... We're going to be building new uses for the blockchain 100 years from now.
 
lukep said:
Try not to think of it as a mere currency or even protocol for a currency... It's much more like the entire internet with all its' different applications, from email, to browsing, to tweeting to voip, to youtube, etc... We're going to be building new uses for the blockchain 100 years from now.
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all that is cool, and you & i will use it, no doubt. but with a word from .gov, it won't matter if its simple enough for moms to use, the average mom won't touch it if they are told its illegal.

folks like you & me count for .001% of potential users. maybe that's enough for bitcoin to be "around", but .gov will assure it will never be mainstream. as much as i 'd like for it to thrive, if it survives, it will always be an underground illegal currency used only by us fringe people.
 
drave said:
all that is cool, and you & i will use it, no doubt. but with a word from .gov, it won't matter if its simple enough for moms to use, the average mom won't touch it if they are told its illegal.
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If the gov specifically made email illegal, would the average mother know that web browsing was also illegal? FTP? Skype?

It becomes a game of not casting too wide of a net for them... If they cast a very focused net, then every other part of bitcoin will flourish, and the rest of the world will call us "North Korea II" for not letting our citizens use what everyone else in the world thinks is as normal as email.

Meanwhile, if they cast too wide of a net, then they're basically enforcing the shutdown of the whole internet, and even the sheeple of murika wouldn't put up with that shit. Why not just turn off our electricity?

No matter what they do, the rest of the world will take the opportunity to profit from our loss and as long as we can see that we won't stand for it in one way or another.
 
lukep said:
I don't know if satoshi spent any of those, but if he did then they are already considered collectors items now.

In fact any Satoshi mined will forever have a nice premium on them. He definitely traded quite a few of those around in 2010, and we can see where every coin to date was mined right now by looking at the blockchain.
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Why do you always refer to Satoshi as "he", when in reality Satoshi is the NSA?
 
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