Ross Ulbricht: 'Oi! Give me back my $34m in Silk Road Bitcoin booty'

If you can seize property such as cars, boats and domain names then I can't see how.

guberment

When it comes to liquidating the proceeds of ill gotten gains the Feds will sell anything they get their hands on even it it takes a yard sale to sell it. Its not usual in white collar crime cases for them to seize a large portion of the shares of company (happened at a company I worked for when the former CEO illegally wouldn't disclose the Mormon church elders who were fronting him money to buy a company and do some asset stripping). The Feds at least are usually smart enough to stagger the sales so as not to crash the stock price.

The fed isn't one entity

If the FBI seize your homeopathic treatments, that doesn't mean the FDA is bound to classify them as medines.

Same deal here, the treasury can view bitcoins as not currency whith the FBI siezes them.

No. They are likely to say that they are investment notes, as indeed the SEC have already said in several cases. A court is unlikely to argue with the SEC regarding this matter.

No. Just no.

Re: strange...

The strange thing here is the bitcoins are a string of numbers, and if I understand correctly they are worth nothing until converted to the destination currency. Is this right?

Total nonsense! You could say the same thing of any commodity. The only thing "unique" about bitcoins is that they have zero inherent value, unlike gold which at least you can make jewelry out of, or a dollar bill which you can burn for fuel or put on the wall as artwork.

The interesting thing about bitcoin is that a bunch of people have decided that because some computers have spent a lot of time searching for chains of hashes with special attributes, that some bitstreams derived from those hashes have value. It's like saying that you can buy a new car with the 49th mersenne prime. OK, maybe a bad example because there's a prize for each new Mersenne Prime found, but having found the prime, you can't plunk it onto the counter at Best Buy and pick up a new TV.

Re: Idiot

Is there an assumption or two there?

Re: Idiot

Backups would be no use to him if (whilst he was incommunicado), the Feds "moved" the money to their own account - so his backup wallets would be as empty as his main one. The question of whether it was encrypted or not (or if encrypted whether the key was available elsewhere on the machine) is however a little more interesting.

Re: Idiot

It's hard to keep your key secret when you've been arrested and have nearly limitless resources being applied to sending you to prison.

Without fail, everyone who has something locked, has their key/combination, whatever hidden somewhere.ost clever people lock up the intervening barriers too, but again, the way to gain access to those things is there. Somewhere. Only fools build 'safes' that can't be opened if something about their situation requires it.

It's really fucking stupid to lock up $30M worth of anything that you could never access again if you had a mild stroke, or were being held for ransom. Whatever the reason, only an Olympic class jackass would store thing of great value in a forever inaccessible way if something happened. If you're that stupid you do deserve to lose it.

Re: Idiot

“It takes a special kind of stupid to keep a single unencrypted copy of a wallet containing millions of dollars, …”

Kinda asumming that was all he had, it is not unreasonable to think a larger stash is still hidden.

As in most blackmarket operations the “cash” lying around is what is needed or collected to do business, until it can safely hidden/moved; Not unlike cash registers in normal legal businesses. Except it was a multi-million dollar international business.

@ DavCrav

LOL. Yeah ain't that the truth.

And yet, while we both know that, I don't think it's a legally admissible argument. Even if it is, in all honesty if I were sitting on a jury and that was your primary argument, I'd vote "not guilty" while pining for the "not proven" option. And I'm the sort of guy who'd prefer these types were strung up on trees as quickly as possible.

Re: It's not real therefore you can't take it from me

^ Except it doesn't appear he is actually claiming that.

Perhaps Ulbricht is totally stupid but it seems more likely he has a smart lawyer who sees good legal grounds for getting the asset back. If it's not in the 'list of things the feds can seize' then they can't legally seize it. It seems eminently sensible, and the obvious course, for Ulbricht and his lawyers to argue that this asset is not covered by such a list.

I suspect he's on a hiding to nowhere but that doesn't mean he's wrong or foolish to try. The feds have over-stepped their powers in the past and may have done so here.

Re: The biggest seizure of Bitcoin in US history

Anomalous Cowshed, you might have mixed up your history a bit.

The Boston Bitcoin Party was in 1773, before the First Continental Congress, so it’s properly part of UK history.

My guess is that the US Civil War episode which you’re thinking of is the 1864 raid on St. Albans (Vermont). Since that Bitcoin seizure was done by Confederate raiders, it is certainly arguable whether a wartime action of the CSA would qualify as a USA seizure. (Of course, one could mention Lincoln’s introduction of “greenbits” during the Civil War — his 19th century version of quantitative easing — as ultimately comprising a greater destruction of value, but that would be straying too far from your topic.)

Re: What ACTUALLY "remains to be seen".

"What actually remains to be seen is what the taxman thinks about Ulbricht having these Bitcoins which, even before the value recently ballooned, were worth a substantial sum"

Indeed, it was the taxman that really cooked Al Capone's goose.

Re: If asset foreiture works the same in the US as it does in the UK

It doesn't. You Brits are bit more civilized about it than we are and will let the defendant keep more assets with less proof. So, yeah, his assets are pretty much toast, even if he beats the murder for hire rap.