How much bitcoin will Ross Ulbricht have if Trump sets him free?
Before Ross Ulbricht’s conviction on charges related to his operation of the darknet market Silk Road, he held 144,000 bitcoins worth $28.5 million. Today, their value would exceed $10 billion. Ulbricht earned this trove by charging a 10% fee from Silk Road transactions. When the FBI shut down Silk Road for various illegalities, federal agents seized — and stole — any bitcoin they could find. Also, in a series of bizarre twists, a hacker swiped some of the bitcoin before it could be seized, and North Korean hackers swooped in to take a share. This mess led the federal government to negotiate an agreement that some misappropriated bitcoin would be used to pay the $183 million in restitution that Ulbricht was required to pay to the US government. As an illegal enterprise involved in sales of narcotics and firearms, most of the bitcoin on Silk Road went into US court proceedings and has slowly been auctioned off by US Marshalls. Some of it remains in the custod...