FBI Could End Up with 5 Percent of All Bitcoins

Thanks to Silk Road Seizure

When the FBI arrested Silk Road boss Ross William Ulbricht and took his site down, they seized the site's assets which were primarily the currency of choice on the anonymous online drug bazaar: Bitcoins. A whole lot of Bitcoins.

In the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, the FBI said that the Silk Road had total sales of over 9.5 million Bitcoins, collecting a revenue of 600,000 of the digital coin. (Given the current price — $140/Bitcoin — that's $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions.)

The FBI initially seized over 26,000 Bitcoins. I asked the FBI spokesperson what the plan is for those cryptocoins. "We will download the Bitcoin and store them," she said. "We will hold them until the judicial process is over."