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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

Now the real question is -- where are they going to go from here?

* Few exchanges will be able to accommodate a 144.3K BTC transaction

* All transactions are public[1]

* The exchange(s) that broker this transaction will receive a massive amount of publicity

Now, it may end up being a bank looking to leverage the ownership of these BTC for their own business dealings, and it could adequately obfuscate where the BTC will go.

Keep in mind that the FBI's BTC address has been permanently tainted -- any shady business that takes security seriously will never do business with that address. This disqualifies the usage of the BTC in sting operations (for example).

[1] History of 'sends' for the FBI's BTC address: https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...

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> Keep in mind that the FBI's BTC address has been permanently tainted

Well, no. Run them through any service with a shared wallet and they're instantly clean. There's no way of tracing them after that point. If they are put through a mixer, you'll end up discriminating against people that are completely unrelated.

> any shady business that takes security seriously will never do business with that address

Almost all systems are automated and won't discriminate one coin from another. Manually checking each input is a ridiculous idea, and destroys the idea that all coins are equal.

How many mixers would you trust with $30M in Bitcoins?

How many trustworthy mixers are going to want to be the service that mixed $30M for the FBI, causing suspicion to be cast on all their other clients?

Any service with a shared wallet would do, not necessarily a mixing service. Doesn't have to be one entity, doesn't even have to be all at once.

Zerocoin? (Not that I think it's a viable option but instead because I believe it was solving this exact problem and I'm curious, practically, how far away the community is from implementing it.)

>If they are put through a mixer, you'll end up discriminating against people that are completely unrelated.

Wouldn't you do that just so people would be afraid to deal with tainted coins or shared wallets?

The FBI could liquidate everything in a private transaction with the Winkelvoss ETF or SecondMarket.

https://www.secondmarket.com/company/bitcoin-investment-trus...

144,000 BTC would be easy to sell, distributed over 2-3 exchanges over a few weeks.

It only represents 7% of the 2 million BTC sold on the top 3 exchanges over the last 30 days: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d

It's still a large enough volume that it would be in their best interest to sell slow enough as to not flood the market and lower the value. Of course, I am assuming they'd want to maximize the return?

Why wouldn't they simply sell them publicly and then buy more if and when they need them? It's not like you need to be part of some club to get them.

With the highly fluctuating value of bitcoin, who chooses WHEN to sell? And if the FBI must preserve it as evidence until all legal issues are resolved, it could be worth much more, or maybe nothing.

There's no need to hold the coins to preserve the evidence: they have cryptographically-secured logs of the funds' provenance (and disposition) in either case.

If they do ever sell, is it a bullish or bearish signal? That they've made peace with the market, or know that a brutal crackdown is imminent (and thus selling at a the top)?

What if the defendant is found not to be guilty? Will the courts return the actual bitcoin, or the value of the bitcoin in USD? If USD, what date/time valuation would they use?

They won't return them just because he's found not guilty.

They are seized as a part of a civil forfeiture action, which means that their seizure is completely distinct, and is handled in a separate court with a lower standard of proof ("Preponderance of the evidence" versus "Beyond reasonable doubt"). It's entirely possible that the court finds him not guilty, and yet the civil court handling the forfeiture action finds the forfeiture legal.

In order to get anything returned to him, he would have to contest the forfeiture in a civil court, and essentially the burden of proof would be on him to prove that the coins were not gained through illegal means, which would mean he would have to show where and how he got them.

In the end, the US government measures wealth based on the dollar, so he would be returned whatever was gained when the coins were auctioned off.

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