Winners of First Seized Silk Road Bitcoin Auction Remain Anonymous

ASDFnz (472824) writes with news that the first block of bitcoins seized from the Silk Road have been auctioned off, and for a pretty high price. The winners are unknown, and Bitcoin has bumped from trading at ~$600 to $650 (USD). From the article: ...In the absence of information speculation both on the markets and on the Internet is building. First Barry Silbert, Founder of SecondMarket and BitcoinTrust has tweeted that they were outbid on all blocks. Since then Alex Walters (a former core Bitcoin developer and the then chief technology officer of Bitinstant) has posted on reddit saying 'I Lost' in his $400 to $500 per coin. That post was closely followed by another reddit user saying that his bid of $451.13 per coin was also unsuccessful. ... Meanwhile the actual price of bitcoins of the various exchanges has risen close to 15% from just under $600 a coin to close to $650. In the end, we may never know who bought the confiscated coins or how much they bought them for but it does seem that it will be a pivotal point in Bitcoin's evolution.

How Can The USMS Sell These?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm curious under what authority the USMS can sell off these coins? Their web site indicate that these coins belonged to "Silk Road" but not to Ross Ulbricht. As far as I know, there was no "Silk Road, Inc." so wouldn't the coins technically belong to Ulbricht or whoever owned / leased the seized servers? Without any kind of corporation Ulbricht would be, in essence, the "sole proprietor" of Silk Road. And if that's the case, how can the marshalls sell off his property without a conviction? It seems like selling his property now is a violation of due process. But then... IANAL.

Re:One stupid question

[nitehawk214]

The buyers of these auctions probably are exchanges. The exchanges themselves do not want them all dumped into the market at once to prevent the prices from crashing.

I would say this arrangement benefits the buyers, exchanges and the government at once. It has the added benefit of appearing to not trying to manipulate coin prices too much.

Re:One stupid question

[risom]

The difference is liquidity. Bitcoins market depth is tiny. A truck full of Euros (about the same market value as the bitcoins) sold at market rate wouldn't be noticable on the charts. 30k of bitcoins sold at market rate would absolutely crush the market.

No exchange at all

[JcMorin]

Since it's a big volume, picking one particular exchange would disturb the price of Bitcoin temporarily. That's why they decided to auction them instead. They could have sold it to the market, but to be wise the would should to sell like 10 BTC per hours unless they willing to go into [bigger] Chinese exchanges... The beauty of bitcoin is that you don't need clearing house, exchange or bank. You can trade them directly.