Nick Barclay / The Verge
The Department of Justice announced it’s seized around 50,676 Bitcoin that a 32-year-old from Georgia fraudulently obtained from The Silk Road — a site on the dark web once called “the Amazon of drugs” — in 2012. After seemingly tipping authorities off to his large cache of Bitcoin a few years ago, James Zhong pleaded guilty to the crime on Friday after authorities found the Bitcoin stored in an underground safe and on a “single-board computer” hidden in a popcorn tin in a bathroom closet, according to a press release from the DOJ.
The government seized the Bitcoin on November 9th, 2021, and says that it was worth over $3.36 billion at the time. Since then, the value has dropped precipitously; it’s now worth just over $1 billion….