The US authorities confiscated more than 69,000 bitcoins from Silk Road’s accounts in November 2020.
Nevertheless, this is not the initial occurrence of this nature; tentative movements were observed as early as July of last year.
Following the formal announcement in January about the desire to sell them, the sum this time is very substantial, valued at about $20 billion.
The original press statement from January only mentioned a little under 3,000 BTC, yet yesterday there were 30,000 BTC exchanged.
Considering this disparity and another element that must be considered, the sale theory seems rather dubious.
Indeed, auctions are the standard method by which the US Department of Justice sells BTC and other confiscated assets to the highest bidder.
Given how few individuals may possibly own twenty billion dollars in cash, it is quite improbable that the lot contains thirty thousand bitcoins.
Due to the exorbitant cost, even an auction with 3,000 bitcoins for sale may have failed to sell. Therefore, it is not surprising that the January press release revealed the plan to offer somewhat less than 3,000 BTC, perhaps split into many smaller lots.
Silk Road was a dark web marketplace that allowed users to shop anonymously using tools like Tor. It accepted Bitcoin as payment and had a wide variety of illicit and shady products for trade.
Officials shut down the platform in 2013, despite its 2011 launch—two years after Bitcoin. It reopened after the seizure but eventually shuttered for good the year after that.
The first big speculative bubble of Bitcoin occurred in 2013, when its price jumped from about $10 to more than $1,000 in little over a year.
The US government began investigating Silk Road in 2013 when they arrested its creator, Ross Ulbricht. By 2020, they had seized some of the bitcoins that Silk Road had collected.
Keep in mind that 1 BTC was worth less than $1 at the start of 2011. However, that year saw the first speculative bubble in its history, which caused the price to rise to $25 before bursting and falling below $5 the following year.
Silk Road processed over 9 million BTC worth of Bitcoin transactions in 2011. A part of the Bitcoins exchanged naturally went into the platform’s coffers as fees from sales.
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