Hold on they haven't found anyone guilty in a court yet have they?
"In civil forfeiture cases, the US Government sues the item of property, not the person; the owner is effectively a third party claimant. The burden is on the Government to establish that the property is subject to forfeiture by a "preponderance of the evidence." If it is successful, the owner may yet prevail by establishing an "innocent owner" defense.
In civil cases, the owner need not be judged guilty of any crime; it is possible for the Government to prevail by proving that someone other than the owner used the property to commit a crime. In contrast, criminal forfeiture is usually carried out in a sentence following a conviction and is a punitive act against the offender.
The United States Marshals Service is responsible for managing and disposing of properties seized and forfeited by Department of Justice agencies. It currently manages around $2.4 billion worth of property. The United States Treasury Department is responsible for managing and disposing of properties seized by Treasury agencies. The goal of both programs is to maximize the net return from seized property by selling at auctions and to the private sector and then using the property and proceeds for law enforcement purposes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#United_States
Since the Government sues the property itself, and since property itself has few if any rights, you can understand how the entire process becomes rather... one sided.
In this case there's abundant evidence of a criminal enterprise involving the sale of drugs, attempts to purchase the services of hitmen etc. etc. So 'Dread Pirate Roberts' only likely defense is to claim something along the lines of 3v1l H4x0rs taking over his computer for the last several years while he played minesweeper or suchlike, and disavow any awareness of of or custody over the money; otherwise he'd have to explain just how he came to be in possession of several $m of BTC that was sent to Silk Road.
This is interesting as an example of BTC's strength being a vulnerability. Suppose you were arrested in a warehouse with a pile of cash and numerous bricks of cocaine, AK-47s, etc. Of course the government would claim you're a drug dealer, but you could attempt to convince the court that you had won the money in Vagas/sold a great deal of pizza/whatever and been kidnapped by evil drug dealers on your way to the bank, only to wake up alone and confused next to your cash in the warehouse just before the cops arrived. An unlikely story to be sure, but there are many legal means through which you might come to possess a large stack of currency (and which might also provide you with a much-needed alibi, eg video of you winning big and leaving the casino only to be waylaid on the strip by masked bandits). Where BTC is concerned, though, the blockchain itself is proof that the money was sent to the receiving address given out by Silk Road in exchange for contraband, so the government has a prima facie case that it consists of revenue from a criminal enterprise.
He’s going to struggle to show why people around the world have paid $100M in bitcoins to him, some of which tie to Silk Road directly, and that the bitcoins are his and shouldn’t be seized or forfeited, but that the drug connection is false.
That fails the straight faced reasonable person test. It’s interesting how when it comes to some things like this, people conflate the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to be “beyond any doubt”.
The real losers here are the Silk Road users who just forfeited whatever they had sitting in the site's coffers. Even if someone made the unwise decision to come forward and say, 'I used the site legally and that's my money,' the feds could still say it was a site devoted mainly to illegal activity and so that argument is moot.