Will the feds sell the bitcoins to fund government activities? If so, bitcoin could survive? Could ‘seizure’ of that many bitcoins kill it?
Wrong.
Wrong.
They don’t have street addresses, except for those users who failed to use PGP. Most did. The only way to get at the addresses would be to track down individual vendors, all of whom have likely ditched everything by now.
They’re watching for places where those different identities intersect. Not only would you need a separate identity for each service, you would also need a discrete device and location. And in the real world, you would need to keep those devices powered off and in discrete, secure physical locations, remote from yourself. It’s a real hassle. If you carry the same cellphone with you from physical location to physical location, at each of which you access a separate service on a separate device, they may be able to use even that to link all the separate accounts into one big master account. And then they will start trying to pick it apart using all the tools at their disposal.
The problem (for criminals) with online crime is that there’s both digital evidence and physical evidence. While the physical evidence can be destroyed or hidden, big chunks of the digital evidence will be around forever for them to analyze. This guy is toast.
It will be interesting to see how well they can match Bitcoin transactions to real people.
On the other hand, maybe Ross Ulbricht is a patsy. How many different people were Dread Pirate Roberts?
A lot of comments describe Ross Ulbricht as “sloppy.” Maybe that’s intentional on the part of the real DPR. Maybe the real DPR compromised Ulbricht and a bunch of other people, and only works remotely through their devices and accounts.
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Imagine how much money could have been made if most of this stuff (not the murder for hire, obviously…) was just legal and taxed instead. There’s obviously a market… Where’s the vaunted free hand when you actually need it?
But good god, murder-for-hire. What kind of psychopathic idiot is he?
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Aren’t Bitcoin transactions kept as a public ledger? Wouldn’t it be relatively easy to see if $3.5 million worth of Bitcoins got dumped into a new account in the past day or two? I imagine that volume would stand out.
I assume the FBI isn’t going to transfer the coins to some FBI bitcoin wallet. They’re just going to keep his wallet.
Isn’t that a security issue? What if he has his key backed up or written down, can’t he just grab the money later or have a buddy get it?
The government may be shut down, but this department at the FBI now has a few million dollars in extra funding to tide them over.
Fair enough. In retrospect I am lumping ‘the valley’ all together, and have been paying a little too much attention to the ‘surrey 6’ murders. I was probably thinking of Abbotsford.
Given the amount of detail of the email exchanges with the alleged blackmailer and hit man, either both of them were actually police and/or informants doing entrapment, or else DPR’s Silk Road system has been compromised for a long time or is retaining information that any sensible Bad Guy would have deleted, indicating that the information security was amazingly bad for a site that’s trying to provide a secure marketplace for illegal activities. Sure glad I didn’t try to buy any, umm, “research chemicals” there.
My money says that the NSA tipped off the Feds about this guy and were integral in identifying him as the suspect. I imagine if the charges are accurate, this guy is looking at most of the rest of his life in jail. I wonder if he’ll be offered or accept a plea bargain? It’ll be interesting to see whether the evidence against him is admissible. If the NSA colluded with the FBI, then surely Dread Pirate Roberts fourth amendment rights were violated?
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Didn’t I just read an interview with the DPR not very long ago? Am I right no one had a clue who he as until this happened? That’s what PO Boxes are for.
I was going to say, didn’t I just read about another site coming up to compete with Silk Road, but that was Atlantis, which I see shut down now.
Well - that sucks. I’m sure something will fill the void - but it’s going to be hard to gain the trust and security. Hell - I am a bit surprised no one in the gov. has considered running such a site as a honey pot.
You miss the point. The fact that the indictment was unsealed today doesn’t mean that they weren’t working in advance. I’d wager that anyone who was possible to track down had no clue this was coming, and was already in custody for at least a week when the indictment was unsealed.
I can’t wait for the book on this and the subsequent movie. Hell, scratch that. I’d like a year long mini-series.
There’s always a few that’ll sully the name I suppose. Synchronicity: I wore my [‘Dread Pirate Roberts “Franchises Available”’][1] shirt to work today! 
[1]: http://www.cafepress.com/mf/11908897/dread-pirate-roberts_tshirt
Maybe. But consider: according to the complaint, the FBI obtained the Silk Road site data on July 23. They also took over Freedom Hosting (a Tor hidden service provider) servers around the same time. They then used the Tor FH servers they controlled to distribute malware (CIPAV) that identified users of the Tor Browser Bundle and reported that information to a (presumably) Federally-controlled server in Virginia. The FBI took down Freedom Hosting for the child pornography sites it hosted, and likely compromised Tor to snare users of those sites, along with whoever else they could snag. But CIPAV has been used by the FBI for about a decade. The bug in the version of Firefox that the Bundle is based on has since been fixed (reportedly), but it does suggest that the FBI might have the capability to pull this off on its own, without NSA help, and that, furthermore, that it might have nabbed Silk Road by compromising Tor itself.
Opinion on that last part is, of course, divided.
