The US government confiscated tens of thousands of Bitcoin from the online black market Silkroad years ago. On March 14, it already sold 9,861 Bitcoin for $215.7 million and now plans to sell another 41,000 Bitcoin. Despite the sale by the US authorities on March 14, the Bitcoin price has risen sharply in the past period.
Total of 51,352 Bitcoin
With the closing of Silkroad, the US government confiscated a total of 51,352 Bitcoin. The first 9,861 of these have now been sold and the rest will soon also be on sale. “The Government expects the seized Bitcoin to be liquidated in four installments over this calendar year,” reads a court document.
The last 41,491 Bitcoin will only be sold after James Zhong has been tried, who was also part of Silkroad, the black market place that was closed in 2012. At the time of writing, the seized Bitcoins are valued at approximately $1.4 billion.
Those are not sickening amounts that will be on the market this year. It is quite possible that the price will suffer from this in the negative sense of the word. It is interesting that the US government apparently thought it was a good idea to hold Bitcoin for so long.
Guns, drugs and stolen credit cards
Silkroad’s marketplace made it possible to buy and sell things like guns, stolen credit card information, and drugs. Not long after the marketplace started, it caught the attention of the authorities, not entirely unexpectedly.
Ross Ulbricht, beloved within the Bitcoin community, has now spent 10 years in prison for founding the marketplace. His family sometimes shares messages from him on Twitter, which are still widely liked and shared on the platform.
It remains to be seen what this news will do to the Bitcoin price. For the time being, it seems to have relatively little effect and we are calmly acting on the same course that we were initially working on.