US Supreme Court refuses to hear $4.4 billion Silk Road Bitcoin case

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case involving the ownership of 69,370 bitcoins (about $4.4 billion) associated with the dark web market Silk Road. The move appears to have cleared the legal roadblocks for the U.S. government to sell the seized cryptocurrency assets. In 2022, a federal court in California rejected Battle Born Investments' claim to ownership of the bitcoins. The company claimed to have purchased the rights to the bitcoins through bankruptcy property, but the court held that it could not prove that the debtor Raymond Ngan was the mysterious man who stole the bitcoins from Silk Road. In 2023, the San Francisco Federal Court of Appeal upheld the original verdict. After the Supreme Court refused to hear Battle Born's appeal, the case was basically impossible to move forward. This means that the obstacles to the government's disposal of the funds have been basically cleared. Earlier news, between July and August this year, the U.S. government transferred about $2.6 billion worth of bitcoins to new wallets, possibly in preparation for the sale. (decrypt)