A list of potential bidders for the federal government's multimillion-dollar bitcoin auction was released in error Wednesday by the U.S. Marshals Service, media reports say.
The Marshals Service confirmed that it distributed the names in an email to update interested parties on the auction's guidelines, the New York Times and other news organizations reported.
"The U.S. Marshals Service inadvertently sent an email today revealing the email addresses of people who had submitted questions about the bitcoin auction to a general USMS mailbox that had been created for the auction," Lynzey Donahue, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals, said in an email. "The USMS apologizes for this mistake which was in no way intentional."
The Times cited a report from CoinDesk, a website that follows the virtual currency. The coins are worth about $18 million at current market values.
The virtual bitcoins to be auctioned were seized last fall from the Internet marketplace Silk Road. The anonymous website was a major sales point for illegal drugs and other underground goods.
Bitcoins are an unregulated online currency that are not backed by gold, silver or any other commodity.
Because they do not generally exist in the real world, what is actually being auctioned are sets of numbers that have been entered in an online public ledger. The sale will take place on June 27.
The bitcoins are to be auctioned off in blocks of 3,000, each worth about $1.8 million. The auction will take place over a 12-hour period.
Still under dispute are another 144,000 bitcoins that were owned by Ross Ulbricht, 30, the man behind Silk Road.
Federal agents arrested Ulbricht Oct. 1 in the science fiction section of the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
He was charged with drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking, and is being held without bail in New York. He is charged separately in Maryland in connection with a murder-for-hire plot.
Contributing: Elizabeth Weise in San Francisco
Copyright 2014USAToday
Read the original story: Bitcoin boo boo: Feds reveal potential bidder list
June 18, 2014 at 09:00PM
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