"Let's sell them all in blocks of 3000 and require a deposit of $200k to bid" ... yeah ...
[1] As to whether the government is morally, ethically, or legally entitled to the seized properties, I have no opinion. I don't know anything about the situation.
These coins were technically owned by all the people with accounts on the Silk Road and were not necessarily going to be used for illegal transactions. For all we know this is basically government stolen money from some guy who wanted to buy a sandwich with Bitcoin just for the laughs and to say he did.
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Well, let's not go that far. I'd totally give someone my wallet if they were pointing a loaded gun at my head. Ain't nothing in there worth dying for.
With that said, I agree there's risk involved in having the Silk Road hold your money and you can expect it might be seized by law enforcement. That doesn't make the government in the right morally for doing so despite the law saying they can- which was exactly my point in the first place. I'm not sure we're really on different pages here based on this reply.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that Mt.Gox has clearly shown us the biggest crooks are the ones right out in the open.
Unless this is some weird language trick where hiring a hit man somehow doesn't count as "planning to kill somebody," I'm assuming you are unaware that he was hiring a hitman.
I think the money in GP refers to the other side of the trade -- if you sell an asset on an exchange, you are going to then have money (received from the purchaser) that is yours on that exchange until you are able to extract it.
Ideally, that would be trivial, but that hasn't always been the case for BTC exchanges (Mt.Gox being a notable example for an extended period of time.)
-The government is probably not interested in taking a long time to sell these blocks.
-Lastly, I imagine there are easily more than 10 individuals who are both financially willing and able to purchase blocks of this size.