Comment Re:Seize (Score 2) 243
I suspect the bitcoins in question were 'live' on the servers during the raid.
Running a marketplace means that the servers have to be able to move money about. So the servers have to have access to keys for spending to perform some operations. So the keys have to be accessible to the machine just like pretty much every web server with SSL has a private key that is effectively unencrypted. Sure it might be encrypted under a password but the password is no the same machine.
If he has $30m on the live systems I suspect he had even more stashed away offline. Begging for his money back is probably more of a ploy to try to throw the investigators off the chase for the rest of his cash.
The problem he is gonna have is that he is facing a 20-40 year jail term without parole. So the chance that he will be able to actually cash out his wallets before the bitcoin bubble bursts is essentially zero.
The fed have been shutting these schemes down continuously. Bitcoin is merely the latest incarnation of the old 'gold backed currency' that has been running for 15 years. The feds let them run for three years on average before they shut them down.
And before folk explain why bitcoin is different, all the previous schemes claimed to be different as well. And they all claimed to be beyond the reach of the law.