Hacker News Reader

Comment by intslack | Hacker News Reader

>The forfeiture complaint is considerably more blunt about the feds' position that the entire Silk Road enterprise is inherently criminal

What a bunch of horseshit on part of the feds, while the market was overwhelmingly populated with drugs I know for a fact that there were sellers who only sold things like laptops, flash drives pre-loaded with anonymity software, and DVDs of tails and such.

View on HN

Yes, that's part of their plan though. Not only will they be able to enrich themselves from unilaterally seizing the assets of Silk Road, but they are also deterring others from selling products on questionable marketplaces. It's quite insidious.

Their argument is as such: You shouldn't have been selling legitimate products on Silk Road to begin with, since Silk Road is an illegitimate storefront.

Edit: intslack has fixed the quotation :-)

What are you quoting from?

I don't think it's a direct quote, I couldn't find it - but I'm assuming he's speaking of the fact that the feds are treating all transactions as criminal.

Couldn't someone open up a suit against the feds to claim their stolen BTC if this was the case? Sure, they'd need a whole lot of evidence, but like you said, there were some 'legit' sellers.

I bet "the feds" will happily return the money of any seller that is willing to provide them the complete records of their customers, as it would probably give them a whole bunch of real-world identities that they could then use to start figuring out who everyone is.

Sure you can, if you have a few million dollars under your mattress for lawyer fees.

And if you're squeaky clean because IRS and every alphabet agency might come after you.

So you have rights. Maybe.

Did they declare any BTC coin gains on their 1040? If not, case closed.

If you only operated in 2013, you still have until April 2014 to file.

Also arts and crafts, personalized poetry and short stories, foodstuffs, homemade clothing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com