The Government's plan to sell $1,170,000,000 worth of BTC: The seizures, selling and hypocrisy

The Silk Road Coins

As part of the US Government's investigation into the Silk Road, it has seized ~51,680 Bitcoins between November 9 2021 and June 8 2022 in 8 separate seizures. If the lowest spot price on the day of seizure is considered the price of the coins, then the total amount is worth $3,406,622,581.57

Picture of the cost breakdown and dates of seizure

The Government has been able to link 3 of the 8 batches of BTC directly to Silk Road:

1 - 50,491.06251844 Bitcoin on November 9 2021

2 - 825.38833159 Bitcoin on March 25, 2022

3 - 35.4470080 Bitcoin on May 25, 2022

This comes to a total of around 51,351 BTC

The BTC traceable to Silk Road

###Sales of Seized Bitcoins The government has started selling these 51,351 BTCs as part of a court order. On March 14, 2023, the Government sold 9,861 BTC for a total of $215,738,154.98. After $215,738.15 in transaction fees, the net proceeds to the Government were $215,522,416.83

Of the Bitcoin forfeited in this case, there remains approximately 41,490 BTC which the Government is expected to "liquidate in four more batches over the course of this calendar year"

If we take a price of BTC on CoinMarketCap right now of 28,380 the total price of the remaining BTC comes to $1,177,486,200

###The Hypocrisy

Multiple branches of the Government and many prominents politicians have been trying hard to limit the general populace from owning and using crypto. They are trying to declare it a contraband because it is soooo dangerous.

The Government deals with other seized contraband such as illicit drugs by burning or otherwise destroying it. But not this dangerous coin.

They want us to not touch it but it is absolutely acceptable for them to make over 1 Billion dollars by seizing coins. No double standards there!

#####Edit: Source document https://i.imgur.com/l7SuBCC.png I cant seem to include a link to the pdf due to it triggering spam filters. Full link is in my comment below. Quite an interesting read abt the silk road