We did not expect the US Marshals Service to release information about the auction of Silk Road bitcoin last week but in the absence of information speculation both on the markets and on the internet is building.
First Barry Silbert, Founder of SecondMarket and BitcoinTrust has tweeted that they were outbid on all blocks.
Since then Alex Walters (a former core Bitcoin developer and the then chief technology officer of Bitinstant) has posted on reddit saying "I Lost" in his \$400 to \$500 per coin. That post was closely followed by another reddit user saying that his bid of \$451.13 per coin was also unsuccessful.
Routers is also now reporting that investment firm Pantera Capital has also been notified that their bids were also unsuccessful.
Meanwhile the actual price of bitcoins of the various exchanges has risen close to 15% from just under \$600 a coin to close to \$650.
In the end, we may never know who bought the confiscated coins or how much they bought them for but it does seem that it will be a pivotal point in bitcoins evolution.
It is anyone's guess what will happen when they decide what to do with the remaining 144,341 bitcoins.
Backstory: It has now been close to 10 months since the FBI raided Silk Road, Arrested the Dread Pirate Roberts (named Ross William Ulbricht in real life) and shut down the hidden tor service. Silk Road had the somewhat seedy reputation of being the Amazon.com of illegal drugs.
In the following months the FBI collected up the pirates stash into two separate piles, the first in the bitcoin address 1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55 totals staggering 29,658.80112195 BTC (or somewhere about \$19 Million US Dollars) and is believed to be the funds that the users of Silk Road had deposited at the time of the raid. This is the bitcoins that has just been auctioned by the US Marshal Service to the highest bidder.
The second amount stored in 1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw is even bigger, totalling just over 144,341 BTC (or over 93 Million USD) is believed to be the pirates personal hoard and is now in civil forfeiture waiting for further developments in the case.
According to the US Marshals Service there were 45 bidders that paid a \$200,000 USD deposit in order to take part in the bidding of the parcels of bitcoin split into nine 3,000 BTC lots and a single block of 2,646 BTC. The the auction, which ran from 6am EST to 6pm EST on 27th June and has now closed.
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