14 DAY TRIAL // A while back we were writing about how the US government had finally decided to auction off about 30,000 Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road, which are worth an estimated $18 million (€13.2 million). The US Marshals, who are handling the auction, have unfortunately embarrassed themselves.
As proof that the people over at the US Marshals office should probably not be handling an auction of Bitcoins since they’re probably a way too advanced concept for them, the identities of the anonymous bidders for the trove of BTC have been revealed.
How this came to be is rather silly. Basically, the office sent some 40 bidders, many whose names were displayed and others whose names could be figured out from the email addresses, a Frequently Asked Question list by putting the addresses in CC.
TechCrunch points out that, while they blacked out the names in the list, the people on the list know each other’s names so it is likely that they’ll make it to the Internet sooner or later.
This is a rather unfortunate event, since those names are supposed to be kept secret and they would likely have not been revealed even after the auction was completed. After all, the biggest thing about Bitcoin is the anonymity it offers. Knowing that someone or another actually bought a huge batch of BTCs is exactly the opposite.
The US government seized nearly 30,000 Bitcoins last fall when it took down the original Silk Road black market where weapons, drugs, and assassinations could be ordered as if you were buying gadgets off Amazon.
The usage of Bitcoins enabled criminals to hide their identities and locations, since it made them virtually untraceable.
At today’s market value, the seized Bitcoins are work over $18 million (€13.2 million), but there was a time, a few months back, when the same stack of BTC was worth closer to $38 million (€27.86 million). As the publication points out, the sum is quite small compared to the current Bitcoin market cap, which stands at over $7.8 billion (€5.72 billion). In fact, the $18 million worth of Bitcoins are only about 85 percent of the total trading completed in the past 24 hours.
The auction is scheduled to take place on June 27 over a 12-hour time period. The nearly 30,000 coins are split into nine blocks of 3,000 BTC, dubbed “Series A,” and another block with the rest of the coins, dubbed “Series B.”
Participants must make a $200,000 (€147,000) deposit from a bank in the United States to be accepted for the auction.