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U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

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Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#131

Post by nannal »

ramenmeal wrote: post #118
LiquidSky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mutual cooperation This is some quality spin, so kudos for that. You make it sound like the government and the individual in question came to a friendly agreement, when what happened was the government discovered the person's identity and used the powers available to them to get a consent to forfeiture out of them. >Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Not at all. Jus…

Disclaimer, I know very little about bitcoin. If you owe the IRS tax money, they can take the money from your bank account without asking. They just do it. Can the same be done with bitcoin? As far as I know, they aren't able to. If that's the case, there's a difference.

> Can the same be done with bitcoin?

No, they don't have the keys, they can't sign a message as you.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#132

Post by icpmoles »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #93
macspoofing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but isn't part of the allure of bitcoin the ability to evade this type of seizure The government didn't crack the wallet address. They 'compelled' the owner to give it to them. Bitcoin was not designed to evade that type of seizure.

As always, the extremely relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

That number too.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#133

Post by klodolph »

ramenmeal wrote: post #118
LiquidSky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mutual cooperation This is some quality spin, so kudos for that. You make it sound like the government and the individual in question came to a friendly agreement, when what happened was the government discovered the person's identity and used the powers available to them to get a consent to forfeiture out of them. >Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Not at all. Jus…

Disclaimer, I know very little about bitcoin. If you owe the IRS tax money, they can take the money from your bank account without asking. They just do it. Can the same be done with bitcoin? As far as I know, they aren't able to. If that's the case, there's a difference.

They can "ask" you for your Bitcoin, but the question is phrased, "Would you rather give us your Bitcoin now, or would you rather spend some time in jail first and give us the Bitcoin later?"

It generally requires a court order to get money out of your bank. If it's a Bitcoin wallet, then they can just send the court order to you directly, and put you in jail until you comply (i.e. as many years as it takes). The differences seem a bit superficial to me.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#134

Post by modeless »

SamBam wrote: post #85
modeless wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will auction it off as soon as possible like they did several times before. I'm not sure why the bitcoin price has gone up in response to this news, because it means more supply is coming to the market soonish. These coins might have been presumed lost before. Certainly they would not have been able to be sold on any legitimate exchange. Now they will be washed clean and enter the markets. On the other hand, a b…

> Certainly they would not have been able to be sold on any legitimate exchange I'm ignorant about this. Would they not have been able to be sold because there's some kind of master list of coins related to criminal activity, and exchanges blacklist them? Or would buyers somehow know specifically which coins they'd be buying and their provenance?

Well, I don't know exactly how much policing of this kind exchanges generally do, but these coins in particular were very closely watched and would not have gone unnoticed, wherever they ended up. Bitcoins are 100% traceable, and when these coins were moved yesterday it was instantly posted on many news sites, before today's announcement that it was actually a seizure by law enforcement.

My guess is that almost all exchanges would flag any account that deposited coins from a list of known tainted addresses like this one, and either immediately freeze it or prevent withdrawals. And any exchange that didn't do it automatically would do it manually after it hit the news.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#135

Post by doggosphere »

dralley wrote: post #84
carlmr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ energy. Yes, traditional banking requires energy, too, but not nearly as much per transaction/person.

"Not nearly as much" is quite an understatement. The factor is something like 350,000x more energy required for a bitcoin transaction vs. a transaction on the traditional banking network.

Citation?

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#136

Post by LiquidSky »

ramenmeal wrote: post #118
LiquidSky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mutual cooperation This is some quality spin, so kudos for that. You make it sound like the government and the individual in question came to a friendly agreement, when what happened was the government discovered the person's identity and used the powers available to them to get a consent to forfeiture out of them. >Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Not at all. Jus…

Disclaimer, I know very little about bitcoin. If you owe the IRS tax money, they can take the money from your bank account without asking. They just do it. Can the same be done with bitcoin? As far as I know, they aren't able to. If that's the case, there's a difference.

This is the kind of magical thinking I'm talking about.

If you owed the IRS tax money, you have a legal obligation to pay it, the IRS isn't responsible for coming and finding it. Garnishment or seizure are tools they can use to get the money, but the obligation is always there. If you don't pay you incur fines and penalties, potentially criminal penalties.

You also have an obligation to report your assets. If you tried to keep your Bitcoin stash secret from the IRS to hide your money, you'd be looking at very serious criminal penalties, not to mention you could never touch your stash again if the IRS is coming after you without them immediately seeing you actually do have extra funds.

Stop treating this as some abstract technical problem that ignores real-world consequences.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#137

Post by ChuckMcM »

Well at least they have a reserve of bitcoin to pay off ransomware demands for a while :-)

Less sarcastically, I feel for "Individual X", I mean here you've gone and managed to gain control over a billion dollars, and you have no way to 'spend' it without revealing that you have it.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#138

Post by mrits »

duxup wrote: post #63
londons_explore wrote: post #39

This gives the US government a lot of power over bitcoin... That both gives the government an incentive to let bitcoin thrive (to protect it's holdings), but also an opportunity to substantially manipulate bitcoins market price, possibly down to nearly zero. Or the keys to these bitcoin will sit idly in a filing cabinet forever...

Is $1B in bitcoins enough to manipulate the price more than say ... just $1B in cash, something the government could somewhat easily just have if it wanted to do so? I feel like if they wanted to, they'd already be playing that game. It's not out of the realm of possibility this would give an actor more of an opportunity to do so, but it hardly seems required if the motivation was already there. I think it would alre…

I would think they'd have access to plenty of legit and illegitimate wallets as well. So many people are thinking they are doing anonymous transactions while governments have wallets associated with our facebook profile.

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#139

Post by kridsdale1 »

ramenmeal wrote: post #118
LiquidSky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mutual cooperation This is some quality spin, so kudos for that. You make it sound like the government and the individual in question came to a friendly agreement, when what happened was the government discovered the person's identity and used the powers available to them to get a consent to forfeiture out of them. >Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Not at all. Jus…

Disclaimer, I know very little about bitcoin. If you owe the IRS tax money, they can take the money from your bank account without asking. They just do it. Can the same be done with bitcoin? As far as I know, they aren't able to. If that's the case, there's a difference.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road

#140

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

prvc wrote: post #68
macksd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the XKCD you're looking for: https://xkcd.com/538/

What does that have to do with a rubber hose?

Rubber hoses were used by police to beat confessions out of suspects without leaving visible evidence of a beating.

At least according to the materials I've read.

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