Silk Path Founder Arrested While Bitcoins Plummet
Bitcoins have been in the news, between the shut down of Silk Road,a plummet in exchange rates, and a new site that is live-streaming.
It’s been a serious week for Bitcoins within the news; a triple whammy, actually.
First, there was the arrest by the FBI of Silk Road’s founder known online only by their handle ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, but evidently known to the feds only a little more intimately as Ross William Ulbricht- while the seizure and power down of this Silk Road site itself. Silk path ended up being an exclusively Bitcoin gambling site, well-known to many being an available marketplace for illegal drugs and much more; the web site’s just under a million registered users were frequently cash launderers, based on the arrest warrant.
‘Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most advanced and extensive unlawful marketplace on the net today,’ FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell noted in the complaint. Tarbell added that within the past 2 1/2 years, Silk path generated some $1.3 billion worth of comparable Bitcoin trades and netted $85 million in commissions for itself, frequently for things as macabre as hiring hitmen, looking for computer hackers or purchasing illegal weapons.
Major Rate Volatility Ensues
Meanwhile just a few times after the shut down of the site by the feds and the arrest of Ulbricht Bitcoins themselves went through some Cat-5 volatility, if the rates for the digital currency dropped from $139 per Bitcoin to $109.71 per Bitcoin in only under three hours. (more…)