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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

Another question: According to reports Silk Road and DPR made $80 million in commissions. Yet the FBI has only told us about seizing $3.6 million in BitCoins.

Where's the rest of the fortune?

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Well, riddle me this:

Why is the Cayman Islands, with a population of 56,000, the 5th largest financial center in the world?

That would be because they've managed to acquire somewhat of a reputation both for not handing over depositor's money to any and every government thug that waves some paper at them and for returning that money to said depositor on request. A tough reputation indeed to maintain on 21st century earth.

It seems likely that the seized funds were taken from SR's escrow accounts. It matches up roughly with the amount of money said in the FBI complaint to be stored in escrow. I can only assume that they have no idea where his personal Bitcoin stash is, otherwise they would have hyped up seizing ~80mil.

I'd wager Ross only kept enough coins accessible from the machine hosting SL for day-to-day operations, and sent the extra proceeds to an account the production machines didn't have access to, one with the private key either on his personal laptop or in a safety deposit box.

Maybe he buried his BitCoin wallet in the desert.

So what we are saying here is that there might be actual modern burried pirate treasure somewhere. Awesome.

What's unfortunate for DPR is that, even if there is a pirate's booty out there, the whole murder for hire thing and being an accessory, if not a patricipant, in a massive amount of drug trafficking makes it very likely that he will spend a large chunk, if not the rest of his life, in prison, making the 80 mil all but unusable to him.

I would think he could get some very high quality legal representation w/ $80 million lurking out there. Although it might be complicated by the fact that he won't be allowed out on pre-trial release. And let's face it; he could very well be the fall guy for the originators of Silk Road and not the "real" Dread Pirate Roberts at all.

As far as I'm concerned, the murder-for-hire thing is bullshit.

As far as i'm concerned the whole libertarian crusader thing was bullshit.

If I may ask - why do you think so?

he can buy a lot of cigarettes

I'm pretty sure it was a reference to Breaking Bad character Walter White burying his $80mm dollars in barrels in the ground somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico.

Spoilers much?

Oof, sorry! Didn't think about spoiler tags on HN.

Most likely they are using the current value of BTC against the cumulative proceeds which vastly overstates revenue unless all funds were kept in BTC.

The article refers to a "26k BTC fortune", which was confiscated, while the complaint against Ross said the total SR commissions were 614,305 BTC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Site_s...).

Exactly. That severely overstates the revenue taken in as SR was in business for quite some time before BTC was worth much. SR started in early 2011 when 1 BTC was worth less than $1. Hosting alone would have taken many tens of thousands of dollars a month a today's exchange rates.

Wine, women, and song?

Supposedly DPR lived well within his means in modest accommodations.

He lived in San Francisco...

$1000 a month in SF is living very modestly. His life doesn't sound like it was very enjoyable.

FBI was hoping you'd never ask!

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