I think it's pretty standard when auctioning high-dollar-value items to require some sort of verifiable deposit to prove you actually could make the purchase if you're the high bidder...
That's completely normal - it's just a way of ensuring the bidder is making a serious offer and can follow through with it. Same thing if you buy a house, when you put in your offer you need to write a check for 'earnest money' (anywhere from a few thousand to 5% of the list price) to show you mean business.
Considering that each asset is worth over $1M I imagine the deposit keeps out the riff-raff.
Yes, since they're being sold in 3000 BTC blocks, the deposit is understandably high. I imagine the blocks will sell for much more than that.
if you have $17 million to spend, is $200k that big of a deal?
You can bid on a single block of 3k Bitcoin (~$1.5m @ 500$/Btc)
Well considering that's around $16.7 million, I'm not surprised.
What's more amusing is that the auction is "cash only".
I take that to mean cash in the sense of liquid assets, as opposed to something leveraged or what have you. Not cash in the sense of a briefcase full of cash.
TERMS OF SALE: Cash. The bid must be an all cash offer.
You have to wire the money, so it's not physical stacks of currency. But it does have to be US dollars.
Yes, that's what he meant by liquid assets.
Usually it means either cash or a cashier's check. Sometimes wire-transfer is also accepted. For lower-value items (police auctions of bikes and the like) people normally pay actual cash. For higher-value items (e.g. home foreclosure sales), people more often bring a cashier's check or wire the amount (depends on the jurisdiction).