So the alleged founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, appeared in court today. If you still don’t know what Silk Road is, here’s everything you need to know. When the FBI shut his site down, they also seized all of its assets – a whole lot of Bitcoins – Bitcoins, which used to belong to the site’s users.

The FBI haven’t been able to get to Ulbricht’s stash of the online crypto-currency yet, which they believe to be worth over $80 million – all generated from sales commissions. That’s 600,000 Bitcoins. That’s 5% of all the Bitcoins in existence. Ulbricht cleverly kept his stash somewhere other than the Silk Road site and encrypted them to keep them out the FBI’s grasp.

Ex-Silk Road users are not happy about the seizure though. Some users claim they uploaded their “nest egg” of Bitcoins onto the site just hours before it was shutdown and seized. Some say they only bought legal items on the site and the FBI has no right to take their money as they’re not even American. This is where a bit of a grey-area comes in as Bitcoins are not controlled by any government organisation. Its an online currency that obeys no borders.

Reddit users were able to track down the Bitcoin wallet used by the FBI to hold all the seized Bitcoins. Here it is. You can see an influx of 27,000 Bitcoins coming into it from October 2nd. People have taken it upon themselves to use the wallet as a public forum by donating a tiny amount of Bitcoins and sending messages, which you can read here. One anonymous “donator” had this to say,

hey computer geek, who control this address. Ross Ulbricht’ is not the bad guy, you are a bad guy. Please open your eyes, dont be brainwashed, and think your self!!!

There’s almost $3,5 million worth of Bitcoins in that wallet right now.

Bitcoins’ worth dropped 11% when Silk Road was shut down but it has recovered since then. When an FBI spokesperson was asked if Silk Road users could ever recover their seized Bitcoins back, she laughed and said,

There is not likely to be restitution in this case. If they’re knowingly buying something illegal, they can’t get their money back

[Source : Forbes]