Bitcoin is at once anonymous and completely public. You can follow transactions through the system in real time and see where large buys have taken place or, in this case, large transfers. See, after the fall of Silk Road, the federal government transferred 26,000 BTC to a private wallet that, at this point, has become a target for pranksters who have turned it into a sort of anti-government graffiti wall.
These mini transactions sent to the FBI’s wallet are probably the most public reaction to the Silk Road seizure on the “open” Internet.
According to Bitcoin chatter, the FBI took 26,000 BTC belonging to Silk Road users – presumably from the wallets into which they deposited BTC before making transactions. They placed the BTC into the wallet address “1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX.” A wallet owned by Ross Ulbricht containing 600,000 BTC – estimated to be 5 percent of total BTC in circulation – is still inaccessible because it is completely encrypted.
The messages to the FBI are in the “public note” section of each minuscule Bitcoin transaction. Many of them mention the ridiculousness of drug prohibition but some are a bit off topic:
Another comment included this Howard Zinn quote: “They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”
The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning.