Who owns the single largest Bitcoin wallet on the internet?In September, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online drug marketplace, and it started seizing bitcoins belonging to the Dread Pirate Roberts — the operator of the illicit online marketplace, who they say is an American man named Ross Ulbricht.The seizure sparked an ongoing public discussion about the future of Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency, but it had an unforeseen side-effect: It made the FBI the holder of the world’s biggest Bitcoin wallet.The FBI now controls more than 144,000 bitcoins that reside at a bitcoin address that consolidates much of the seized Silk Road bitcoins.Those 144,000 bitcoins are worth close to $100 million at Tuesday’s exchange rates.Another address, containing Silk Road funds seized earlier by the FBI, contains nearly 30,000 bitcoins ($20 million).That doesn’t make the FBI the world’s largest bitcoin holder.This honor is thought to belong to bitcoin’s shadowy inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, who is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins in the currency’s early days.

His stash is spread across many wallets.But it does put the federal agency ahead of the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who in July said that they’d cornered about 1 percent of all bitcoins (there are 12 million bitcoins in circulation).In the fun house world of bitcoin tracking, it’s hard to say anything for certain.But it is safe to say that there are new players in the Bitcoin world — although not as many people are buying bitcoins as one might guess from all of the media attention.Satoshi stores his wealth in a large number of bitcoin addresses, most of them holding just 50 bitcoins.It’s a bit of a logistical nightmare, but most savvy Bitcoin investors spread out their bitcoins across multiple wallets.That way if they lose the key to one of them or get hacked, all is not lost.“It’s easier to keep track of one address, but it’s also most risky that way,” says Andrew Rennhack, the operator of the Bitcoin Rich List, a website that tracks the top addresses in the world of bitcoin.

According to Rennhack, the size of the bitcoin universe has expanded over the past year, but the total number of people on the planet who hold at least one bitcoin is actually pretty small — less than a quarter-million people.Today, there are 246,377 bitcoin addresses with at least one bitcoin in them, he says.And many people keep their bitcoins in more than one address.A year ago, that number was 159,916, he says.Although some assume that the largest Bitcoin addresses are held by bitcoin dinosaurs — miners who got into the game early on, when it was easy to rack up thousands of bitcoins with a single general-purpose computer — almost all of the top 10 bitcoin addresses do not fit that profile, says Sarah Meiklejohn, a University of California, San Diego, graduate student.She took a look at how many transactions in these wallets seemed to match the profile of early-day miners and found that only one of them really fit the bill.The rest seem to belong to what Meiklejohn calls Bitcoin’s “nouveau riche”: People who are accumulating bitcoins from non-mining sources.

“What you’re seeing is this influx of a different kind of wealth,” she says.Because most bitcoin addresses haven’t been publicly identified — like the FBI’s — it’s hard to say exactly makes up the new Bitcoin top 10.Meiklejohn says that they’re likely to include wallets created by up-and-coming Bitcoin exchanges or businesses.One of them is the wallet that’s thought to contain 96,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk-Road successor, Sheep Marketplace.litecoin block reward scheduleWhile the FBI may have its hands on the founder of Silk Road’s bitcoin wallet, that doesn’t mean it has access to what's inside.bitcoin avalon 3Ross Ulbricht, despite his own self-incriminations as the mastermind behind the online black marketplace, was able to do one thing right: secure his bitcoins.bitcoin ethical issues

A reported 600,000 BTC belonging to Ulbricht is in the FBI’s hands.But they can’t access the bitcoin wallet because it is encrypted.This supposedly is separate from the 26,000 BTC that was left in an escrow account, which was being used to exchange money between the marketplace’s users and dealers.For law enforcement, taking on new technologies isn’t always a smooth operation.bitcoin paper wallet redditAs criminals adopt new concepts, cops have to figure out new crime-solving methods.flash drive bitcoin minerWith bitcoin that’s no exception.faucet bitcoin que esBut what most people in the bitcoin community can pretty much agree upon is the fact that killing off Silk Road was a good thing for the future of bitcoin."Taking down Silk Road was an important step in helping legitimize and bring bitcoin into the mainstream.

Liquidity is a big problem right now that impedes bitcoin's growth, hopefully this 5% stash can be recovered and reinserted into circulation to get more people and businesses using BTC,” said Travis Skweres, CEO of bitcoin exchange CoinMKT.It may make some BTC investors wary that a government entity is in possession of so many bitcoins.After all, it is fear of the Feds trying to shut down decentralized virtual currencies that may be the biggest risk of all right now for considering bitcoin as an asset class.“I’ll be glad to see these bitcoins transitioned to the wider community,” says Jaron Lukasiewicz, the founder of Coinsetter, a high-performance bitcoin exchange designed for traders.Not only will investors delight on seeing these bitcoins back on the market, such a huge amount being back in circulation will help volume, and thus liquidity overall.“Without the private key, it would be impossible for the government to access the bitcoins,” says Ankur Nandwani, who runs bitcoin micropayments service BitMonet.

Conceivably, the government could make some sort of deal with Ulbricht to provide the key to the bitcoin wallet holding the approximate 489,000 bitcoins it cannot currently access.It will be interesting to see if the government will try.It has made various statements in the past that it believes bitcoin is real money, but they can literally put money where their mouth is by making a deal to release those coins.After all, 489,000 bitcoins is no small sum, amounting to over $92m in BTC using the latest CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index valuation.The feds certainly aren’t talking about what access they have to Ulbricht’s stash of bitcoins, but the block chain can prove to us a few things, says Dan Held of Zeroblock.“We know the FBI has access to 144,000 bitcoins since they moved them on 10/25.Whether or not they have access to the remaining 489,000 bitcoins is debatable,” says Held.Indeed, on 25th October, approximately 144,000 bitcoins were moved to this address.They were moved in segments of 324 BTC, which has been presumed to stand for “FBI” on a dial pad.

Also, the phrase “DPR Seized Coins” was added as a note to each transaction on the block chain.What might be the most intriguing aspect of these bitcoin seizures is just how the Feds will eventually get fiat for them.As it stands right now, dumping the amount of bitcoins that it has in its possession could take a long time, since exchanges are not used to handling that sort of volume.The FBI has told Forbes that they will sell their bitcoin holdings after Ulbricht’s trial.But there might be a problem doing that all at once.“Mt.Gox, BitStamp, and BTC-e combined don't have the volume necessary to facilitate a sale of that size,” said Zeroblock’s Held.He’s probably right – daily volume for the top five exchanges is currently around 58,000 BTC, using the most recent 24-hour data from Bitcoin Charts.The feds may have to ultimately auction off the coins, which might be of interest to any bitcoin investor out there.“If they auction off the coins, it will most likely be at a discount to current prices, as there is not enough demand to execute at the current market price,” says Held.