U.S. Marshals are going to auction more than $11 million in Bitcoin

By Mike Flacy Published October 28, 2020

Scheduled to take place on March 5, 2015, the United States government will be placing another 50,000 Bitcoin on the auction block in segments of 2,000 and 3,000 Bitcoin. Currently valued around $235 a Bitcoin, the market value of the entire block of Bitcoin comes in around $11.8 million. While the value of Bitcoin will likely change before the start of the auction, the price of Bitcoin has been fairly stable for the last 30 days after falling to a low of $177 during mid-January.

This block of 50,000 Bitcoin was seized from Ross Ulbricht, the alleged creator of the Silk Road online black market. Recently convicted on a number of charges related to narcotics, Ulbricht had claimed that he wasn’t responsible for the illegal activity that occurred on the site. A federal jury disagreed and Ulbricht is now facing a possible life sentence for his role in Silk Road’s operation. His official sentencing will occur on May 15, 2015.

Recommended Videos

To register for the Bitcoin auction being run by the U.S. Marshals service, you will need a hefty cash deposit to prove eligibility. The 2,000 Bitcoin block requires a deposit of $100,000 and the 3,000 Bitcoin block requires a deposit of $150,000. A total of 20 blocks will be auctioned off on March 5 and the winning bidders will be notified by the end of the following day.

This is actually the third auction for Bitcoin related to the Silk Road seizure. During June 2014, the U.S. Marshals service auctioned off roughly 30,000 Bitcoin and an additional 50,000 were auctioned off during December 2014.

Interestingly, if the U.S. Marshals service had auctioned off the entire allotment of Bitcoin shortly after the initial seizure during October 2013, the value of the entire block would have been worth approximately $125 million. Assuming the U.S. Marshals service have obtained current market value for previous auctions and will do the same for next month’s auction, the approximate revenue generated from the sales will total around $45 million.

Contributing Editor

By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Rice grain-sized sensor could give robots a delicate touch and keep them from breaking stuff

Sprout Robot

Robots are incredibly precise, but being gentle is not always their strong suit. A machine that can build a car with near-perfect accuracy can still apply too much pressure when working in places where even the smallest mistake matters, like inside a human eye or during delicate surgery. That is why researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University are developing a new type of force sensor that could help robots “feel” what they are touching more accurately.

The sensor is tiny, about the size of a grain of rice at just 1.7 millimeters wide, making it small enough to fit inside advanced surgical tools. What makes it especially interesting is that it does not rely on traditional electronics. Instead, it uses light to measure force from every direction, including pressure, sliding movements, and twisting. Here is how it works. At the tip of an optical fiber sits a soft material that slightly changes shape when it comes into contact with something. That tiny deformation alters how light travels through the sensor. The altered light pattern is then sent through optical fibers to a camera, which captures it like an image. Researchers then use a machine learning model to study those light patterns and translate them into precise force readings. In simple terms, the system learns how to “read” touch through light alone, without needing a bunch of wires or multiple separate sensors packed into such a tiny space.

Emerging Tech

Meta’s own employees are having a hard time digesting AI. Who would’ve thought?

Artificial Intelligence

If you wanted a snapshot of what it looks like when a tech giant tries to force-feed its workforce an AI future, look no further than Meta right now. The company that built its empire on knowing everything about its users has turned that same appetite inward, and its employees are not happy about it. Last month, Meta quietly informed tens of thousands of its U.S. workers that their corporate laptops would begin tracking their keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and screen activity. The purpose was to feed that behavioral data into Meta's AI models so they could learn how people actually use computers. The reaction was immediate — within hours, internal comment threads were flooded with anger, confusion, and more than a hundred emoji reactions that left little to the imagination about how employees felt.

When an engineering manager asked how to opt out, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a blunt answer: there was no opt-out, at least not on a company laptop. This is the same company that is also tying AI tool usage to performance reviews, running mandatory "AI Transformation Weeks" to retrain its workforce, and building internal dashboards that gamify how many AI tokens employees consume in a day — a metric so aggressively tracked that some workers started building AI agents to manage their other AI agents. The whole thing started to resemble a feedback loop eating itself.

Computing

Sci-fi got the gadgets right, but the vibes wrong

Sci-fi got plenty of consumer tech right, but reality keeps delivering the useful, compromised version of the dream

Officer K looking up at a neon-colored hologram in Blade Runner 2049.

I was recently waiting for an Uber when the GPS decided to lie for sport. The car was somewhere nearby, I was somewhere nearby, and somehow both of us were trapped in that modern ritual of wrong pins, slow turns, vague waving, and "I'm here" messages that help absolutely no one.

That was when I had a very reasonable thought: this is exactly where a hologram of a giant arrow pointing at me would be useful.