Summary:
- Silk Road’s creator Ross Ulbricht will have his debt to the US government wiped off
- He owes the US Government $183 million, and it will be paid for using $3 Billion in Bitcoin connected to another unnamed Silk Road hacker
- The figure he owed the government was the amount he was ordered by the courts to pay in restitution for illegal sales on the online black marketplace of Silk Road
The infamous Silk Road marketplace creator, Ross Ulbricht, will have his $183 million debt to the US government paid in full due to the seizure of almost $3 billion in Bitcoin from an unnamed Silk Road hacker. Ulbricht’s payment to the US government is in line with a court filing recently made public.
Consequently, Ulbricht has ‘withdrawn any claim and stipulates to the forfeiture of the Subject Property to the United States without further notice to him.’ He ‘further relinquishes all right, title and interest in the Subject Property and agrees the said property shall be forfeited to the United States and disposed of according to law by the United States.’
Additional court documents from 2020 reveal that the US Department of Justice seized 69,370.22491543 Bitcoin, a similar amount in Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin SV (BSV), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) from a hacker owning the address of 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbh. The US DOJ analyzed several transactions related to the address and connected them to the Silk Road marketplace as proceeds of illegal sales.
To note is that there is no set date from the US DOJ as to when the seized BTC, BTG, BSV, and BCH, will be auctioned.
The initial $183 million debt to the US government was the amount Ross Ulbricht was ordered to pay back in restitution for his part in the illegal sales of narcotics and other items on the Silk Road marketplace. The debt was calculated using the exchange rate at the time of each transaction on the Silk Road.
His court case ended in 2015 with Ulbricht being found guilty of all counts of money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. He is currently servicing a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole.
