For years, the U.S. government has maintained a side hustle auctioning off bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Historically, Uncle Sam has done a pretty lousy job of timing the market.
The 500 bitcoin it sold to Riot Blockchain in 2018 for around $5 million? That’s now worth north of $23 million. Or the 30,000 bitcoin that went to billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper for $19 million in 2014? That would be more than $1.3 billion today.
The government has obtained all that bitcoin by seizing it, alongside the usual assets one would expect from high-profile criminal sting operations. It all gets sold off in a similar fashion.
“It could be 10 boats, 12 cars, and then one of the lots is X number of bitcoin being auctioned,” said Jarod Koopman, director of the Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrime unit.
One of the next seizures up on the auction block is $56 million worth of cryptocurrencies that authorities confiscated…
