The U.S. government has a massive, secret stockpile of bitcoin — Here’s what happens to it

[livingston]

• The U.S. government regularly holds auctions for its stockpile of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and other cryptocurrencies it seizes.
• Auctions kicked off in a big way with the 2013 takedown of Silk Road, a dark web marketplace that traded in illegal goods.

• “It could be 10 boats, 12 cars, and then one of the lots is X number of bitcoin being auctioned,” said Jarod Koopman, director of the Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrime unit.

The government has obtained all that bitcoin by seizing it, alongside the usual assets one would expect from high-profile criminal sting operations. It all gets sold off in a similar fashion.

For the most part, the U.S. has used legacy crime-fighting tools to deal with tracking and seizing cryptographically built tokens, which were inherently designed to evade law enforcement.

The U.S. government has a massive, secret stockpile of bitcoin — Here's what happens to it

The U.S. government has a semi-secret stockpile of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Cavalry]

So when they confiscate piles of US (or foreign) currency do they auction that off as well?

 

[fresch]

No silly it's used for black ops, pallet loads of cash to iran, towelband, you know the thing!

 

[Grimscale]

So let's see a listing of who actually ends up buying this stuff.

Bet it's not someone like you and me.
Bet it's not even someone like you and me who might have a boat load of money.
Bet it's one of their friends who wants to make a ton of "free money" by buying this at pennies and selling for thousands of dollars.