On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
I doubt any exchanges were involved in Silk Road assets. The > advantage of VCs is that you can make transactions between individuals > without any bank or exchange involved. Silk Road held their assets in > their own wallet. When busted by the FBI, it took that agency several > days to access the wallet information. > Silk Road may have had their assets in their own wallet. But they were just intermediaries for the people selling the drugs. Those people all had bitcoin as well. They could no doubt have kept their proceeds in their own wallets as well. But it seems to me that in order for them to do anything with their proceeds, they would eventually have to exchange it with people who were willing to accept it in return for something else (e.g., cash). To do that, they would either have to go back to an exchange or find a counterparty willing to deal with them in private. I'm guessing that their confidence in their anonymity and their desire to seem like normal folk doing normal things with their bitcoin would have led them back to the exchanges. And Mt. Gox was the biggest at one point. Eric
