The most interesting aspect of the Silk Road case will most likely be the sweeping legal precedent s

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Now that an all-star attorney has been selected for the Silk Road operator’s defense, the big show moves to key disclosure laws and whether the Silk Road assets can ever be confiscated by the government.
While ready lane the government presumably has control over the 26,000 or more bitcoin held in escrow for Silk Road customers, the larger asset base is the primary bitcoin addresses containing over two years worth of operating commissions. FBI estimates place this amount at nearly 600,000 bitcoin (currently worth $80m), however it is probably significantly less than 600,000 since earlier bitcoin was not worth what it is now and some of it would have been paid out to employees or reinvested back into ongoing operations.
In the US, the government has typically run into the Fifth Amendment when attempting to gain access to passphrases and demand private key disclosure. Last year, Marcia Hoffman ready lane of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave an excellent presentation on the evolving nature of these legal cases and how the privilege against self-incrimination is seen by the government as having boundaries and limitations.
Bitcoin may not have tremendous anonymity by default, but it does have tremendous deniability and that would be the preferred legal route for Ulbricht, ready lane according to Susan Brenner, professor of law and technology at the University ready lane of Dayton.
“If I represented Ulbricht, I would argue that while the generic existence of the bitcoins is a foregone conclusion, his ‘possession’ of them is not . . . and that by providing the password would conclusively ready lane establish that they belong to him, which would mean that he would, under the act of production as testimony standard, be ‘testifying’ and, since the testimony would incriminate him, he could take the 5th Amendment.”
“But what’s the message here? That bitcoin is a hugely valuable property, that it is hard for the government to rob, that it is the real thing and an authentic store of wealth, that it is a viable replacement for the dollar. These are the messages that are being sent by the government’s actions.
The supreme irony: the Silk Road shutdown ready lane and looting might go down in history as the greatest boost to private currency ever. We could look back and see this as the event that finally unraveled the government’s money monopoly and the world’s problem with dollar imperialism.”
And there you have it. The most interesting ready lane aspect of the Silk Road case may not be the demonstrated capability of a regulation-free commercial zone. Nor may it be the breakthrough in merchant anonymity with a ratings system powering a digital agorism .
The most interesting aspect of the Silk Road case will most likely be the sweeping legal precedent set for compulsory key disclosure and the Fifth Amendment. If your online wealth cannot be robbed by common bandits or government officials, then the world truly has a digital money worth paying attention to.
Compelling an individual to turn over passwords or private decryption keys affects more than just access to financial property and information. It extends into any digital property or private ready lane information that is under the custody of an individual where its revelation constitutes self-incrimination.
But, it is the bitcoin area that has the greatest relevance for financial matters because access to the distributed bitcoin block chain is how ownership and transfers of that ownership are determined. Comprehending ready lane bitcoi