If you were the US Marshals, would you entrust the government's money[1] to an unregulated Bitcoin exchange?
[1] As to whether the government is morally, ethically, or legally entitled to the seized properties, I have no opinion. I don't know anything about the situation.
I think the money in GP refers to the other side of the trade -- if you sell an asset on an exchange, you are going to then have money (received from the purchaser) that is yours on that exchange until you are able to extract it.
Ideally, that would be trivial, but that hasn't always been the case for BTC exchanges (Mt.Gox being a notable example for an extended period of time.)
Yes, that's what I was referring to. Instead of "money," perhaps I ought to have said "value." Analogously, if I had a pound of gold, and I gave it to a broker to sell for me, I'd be trusting that broker with my "value."
I'm not sure one could possibly argue that this is morally or ethically "right". Legally it's apparently a-ok though.
These coins were technically owned by all the people with accounts on the Silk Road and were not necessarily going to be used for illegal transactions. For all we know this is basically government stolen money from some guy who wanted to buy a sandwich with Bitcoin just for the laughs and to say he did.
That analogy is quite a reach, the guy behind silk road wasn't killing anybody or planning to.
With that said, I agree there's risk involved in having the Silk Road hold your money and you can expect it might be seized by law enforcement. That doesn't make the government in the right morally for doing so despite the law saying they can- which was exactly my point in the first place. I'm not sure we're really on different pages here based on this reply.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that Mt.Gox has clearly shown us the biggest crooks are the ones right out in the open.
That analogy is quite a reach, the guy behind silk road wasn't killing anybody or planning to.
Unless this is some weird language trick where hiring a hit man somehow doesn't count as "planning to kill somebody," I'm assuming you are unaware that he was hiring a hitman.
[1] As to whether the government is morally, ethically, or legally entitled to the seized properties, I have no opinion. I don't know anything about the situation.