US authorities shut down the drug trafficking website silk road and arrested the owner today. In the move, they seized $3.6 million in bitcoins.
It’s a brave new world where people can buy drugs online and pay with bitcoin. In any case, I assume the government will be unloading those bitcoins for hard currency at some point and $3.6 million is more than the total transaction value on most days.
If that value is right it would also represent about 0.2% of all bitcoins in existence. It might not sound like much but if 0.2% of all the oil, gold or US dollars in the world hit the market at once, it would cause big waves.
