Feds to auction off second tranche of Silk Road Bitcoins worth $19 MEEELLION The US Marshals Service (USMS) is looking forward to another funding bonanza after holding another auction of Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road online bazaar that was allegedly run by Ross Ulbricht under the handle the Dread Pirate Roberts. The auction is for 50,000 Bitcoins, worth $19,241,924 at current market rates, and the …
Requirement N+1: Currency shall be seizure-proof. This shall include multiple layers of delayed auto-cancellation of involuntary transfers, forwarding, and dissemination of coins in the event of duress detection. These features shall inherently frustrate all possible seizure processes. Under your chair you will find a laptop; you have three hours.
They'll give it to the police department of some podunk town in the American midwest that lives in mortal fear of Muslims and Mexicans, so they can buy every officer a five thousand dollar assault rifle dripping its rails off with tactical toys, and a surplus APC for responding to domestic violence calls. The surplus of their homeland security grant will be put into an inevitable settlement fund for when a cop pulls over a black man in a nice car with out of state plates, arrests him with no probable cause, and puts a bullet into him out of anger that there are black people in the world and he has to deal with them.
This is where drug seizure money goes. To buy toys and buy the child-men-pig-cops who play with them out of trouble.
Don't tell America it's now a Communist state...
You have some assets. The government needs some cash, so they seize your assets and accuse you of a crime. If you're found not guilty you still don't get anything back. Instead you need to find more money to take the government to court. Which will take years.
Well technically they are profiting from the drugs trade from the silk road and since these are part of 144,000 coins lifted from the silk road servers. Only back-dated legalisation of the drugs trade will make this "clean" money.
Bitcoin might be unlicensed and unregulated but it's hardly virtual when the Fed can legitimately auction it off for $$. That makes it pretty tangible and acknowledged as an asset.
As for this being virtual yes the balance is just held in a computer system but the same can be said for your bank account balance. Your digital (Virtual) $$ bank balance can buy real beer and so can a digital bitcoin balance.
Well, I traded a gallon of my homebrew West-Coast IPA for a dozen live Dungeness crabs yesterday afternoon. Seems pretty un-virtual to me. A couple days earlier, it was 10 pounds of Venison sausage for 5 pounds of smoked salmon ... and I regularly swap a case or two of my wine for the wines of other vintners. One of my wells is a trifle dry this year (California is in a major drought), so I swap water from the property over the hill for barn space for his horses.
Barter still exists. Just don't tell the IRS ...
“law enforcement may seize physical assets and cash if they believe they were either the product of crime or likely to be used in the commission of a crime. Agencies can then use the money to supplement their budgets.”
“While criminal forfeiture has been a legal statute for many years, those rules require the suspected criminal to be actually found guilty. In comparison, civil forfeiture doesn’t require suspects to be arrested or even charged before their assets are seized.”
“unlike thousands of Americans who face lengthy and uncertain court battles to recover their assets.”
This isn’t a recipe for perverse incentives or just outright corruption. No siree. Move along or I might decide that your car could be used as a get-a-way car or you might go speeding.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-29228851
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