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For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

usmarshals.gov

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Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#81

Post by nitid_name »

rebel wrote: post #73
nkuttler wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a rational investor it would make sense to bid above "market" price. There are many markets, and those markets have a limited volume of coin to sell. Buying 30k coins would have a big effect on the price of any single market. Bitstamp, which says "world's leading bitcoin exchange" about itself can't sell you 30k coins right now. Oh, and bitcoin exchanges have a history of.. let's call it.. problems. A rational in…

You seem to have misread my post. I didn't say that no one would bid above market price, I stated that they would additionally buy up all the coins on the market below their buying price.

Wouldn't that risk driving up the market price of bitcoins, which leads to a higher competing bid on the bulk coins?

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#82

Post by stockkid »

atmosx wrote: post #79
Aaronneyer wrote: post #3

Will be interesting to see how this announcement effects the price of bitcoins. I would imagine there will be an initial drop out of panic, but if we see some wealthy individuals with a vested interest in bitcoin buying these up, it could very much cause a large shift upwards in price.

I don't think so. You're assuming that BTC are somehow equally distributed :-) IMHO they are not ;-)

Would you care to elaborate?

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#83

Post by gnaritas »

eyeareque wrote: post #20
ncallaway wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civil forfeiture is different from criminal forfeiture in that it does _not_ require a guilty verdict. Civil forfeiture is against the _property_, and it puts the burden of proof on the owner of the property to prove that it was obtained legally. Here's another explanation of it that's probably better than mine: https://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-08/539b517ba588a791...

So what happens if he legally obtained these bitcoins, but cannot prove that he did so? So he basically loses them before he even can prove that they are his or not? That doesn't seem right, it would make sense that the coins are held in an escrow status until he was proven guilty.. It seems to be a big loophole for the government to just go and steal whatever they want from you, before you've been proven guilty.

> That doesn't seem right

Right has nothing to do with the law. Law is about what those with power can push through, it doesn't have anything to do with right and wrong.

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#84

Post by sillysaurus3 »

300bps wrote: post #74
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest: There is zero chance that Ross William Ulbricht obtained those coins legally. While that may be beside the point, a rousing speech about how asset forfeiture should be changed would resonate more strongly if the subject was someone other than a person who hired people to murder others. Also, it seems like supreme court justices aren't going to turn against asset forfeiture any time soon, so there's r…

There is zero chance that Ross William Ulbricht obtained those coins legally. Every single article that comes up about DPR or Silk Road, you post multiple comments prejudging literally every facet of the case. The quote above from you is a perfect example. Suppose for a minute that in addition to running the Silk Road, DPR also had a massive mining operation with multiple ASIC processors. Makes sense, right? His whol…

You have me confused with someone else. This is the first time I've mentioned Ulbrict or DPR in any comment: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/author%3As...

It's interesting how unapologetically ravenous people will be.

Also, if DPR was an early miner, then surely he would have said that by now.

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#85

Post by GrinningFool »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #72
mrb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more than 177k BTC changed hands yesterday. You don't see it on the block chain because most of it is transacted off-chain: 788k BTC were sold and bought on Bitcoin exchanges in the last 24 hours - http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=24h So 50k BTC is really nothing (~6%) compared to what the market usually handles every day.

> because most of it is transacted off-chain Does this come with risk? Shouldn't all transactions be on the chain?

I'm not sure why this was downvoted, it's a legitimate question.

The problem is the sheer quantity of transactions that occur on the various exchanges. Adding that volume to the public chain would make the public chain significantly larger than it is. The bitcoin.cc wiki Scalability page [1] does a better job of documenting the constraints than I could in this space.

The flip side of this is that there's a required level of trust when doing business with an exchange. Thus far no exchanges that I know of are actually publishing their ledgers - so we really have no way to know that all trades are made in good faith and all funds are properly managed by the exchanges.

Unlike regulated government currencies, there are no audit requirements. This means there is nothing that actually requires an exchange to be operating in good faith. I'm actually surprised that there are not yet any private exchanges[2] with public/open ledgers, in response to Mt Gox and various other scams (both for bitcoin and other currencies). Seems the market has to be there for it, after people have been burned so many times.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability [2] that I know of. I know there are protocols under development intended to handle this, but no actual exchanges that simply publish all transactions for the world to see.

[edit] can't believe I used 'shear' instead of 'sheer'.

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#86

Post by DickingAround »

What's sad is that this was half the point of bitcoins; they can't be easily seized. I hope the other DPRs are smart enough to have a system which moves their coins before the gov breaks the encryption on the wallets they seize in person.

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#88

Post by rebel »

nitid_name wrote: post #81
rebel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have misread my post. I didn't say that no one would bid above market price, I stated that they would additionally buy up all the coins on the market below their buying price.

Wouldn't that risk driving up the market price of bitcoins, which leads to a higher competing bid on the bulk coins?

Well you wouldn't want to do it before the bids are in. However, there was a gap between when bids are placed and when the winner is announced, that would be a good time.

edit: Of course, any time after the bids were completed would be a good time. After the auction ends would be just as good for you.

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#89

Post by mark-r »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #57
dragonwriter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, these bitcoins are ones that Ulbricht claims are his, not the (much larger) set of bitcoins that weren't on his personal hardware which were linked to DPR which he did not claim (and which were the subject of an earlier sale.)

How does he claim to have acquired them, or has he not made any statement on that yet?

When anything you say may be used against you, would you make any such public statement before the matter comes up in court?

Re: For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

#90

Post by sneak »

DickingAround wrote: post #86

What's sad is that this was half the point of bitcoins; they can't be easily seized. I hope the other DPRs are smart enough to have a system which moves their coins before the gov breaks the encryption on the wallets they seize in person.

There are many DPR-related bitcoins that they were unable to access. Fear not.

This was not "half the point of bitcoins" - the intent of the bitcoin release is only hinted at by Satoshi. Any point you are asserting here is pure speculation.

However, if you think this is a valuable property, a so-called "brainwallet" provides exactly this safety. They've been around for ages. No moving of coins required.

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