"In civil forfeiture cases, the US Government sues the item of property, not the person; the owner is effectively a third party claimant. The burden is on the Government to establish that the property is subject to forfeiture by a "preponderance of the evidence." If it is successful, the owner may yet prevail by establishing an "innocent owner" defense.
In civil cases, the owner need not be judged guilty of any crime; it is possible for the Government to prevail by proving that someone other than the owner used the property to commit a crime. In contrast, criminal forfeiture is usually carried out in a sentence following a conviction and is a punitive act against the offender.
The United States Marshals Service is responsible for managing and disposing of properties seized and forfeited by Department of Justice agencies. It currently manages around $2.4 billion worth of property. The United States Treasury Department is responsible for managing and disposing of properties seized by Treasury agencies. The goal of both programs is to maximize the net return from seized property by selling at auctions and to the private sector and then using the property and proceeds for law enforcement purposes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#United_States
Since the Government sues the property itself, and since property itself has few if any rights, you can understand how the entire process becomes rather... one sided.
The real losers here are the Silk Road users who just forfeited whatever they had sitting in the site's coffers. Even if someone made the unwise decision to come forward and say, 'I used the site legally and that's my money,' the feds could still say it was a site devoted mainly to illegal activity and so that argument is moot.
If they are clever, they won't put everything on the market like this.
Price movements occur as a result of a buyer or seller aggressing into a market and submitting an order such that the parameters of the aggressor's order match the opposite sides unfilled orders. This process is typically referred to as order matching. If a buyer aggresses into the market and matches against unfilled sell orders the price increases because they have removed the lowest prices from the order book. If a seller does something similar the price will drop because the highest prices have been removed.
Another reason price movements occur is because people are also reacting to the market and trying to predict where the market is going. As a consequence they will either enter the market at an off market price attempting to predict it, or cancel their outstanding orders and re-price them. But this is another topic entirely and I will leave it out as it's pretty complex and my understanding of that topic is newb level at best.
The second thing to consider is the why. Why do price movements occur? Mainly because people are consuming information and trying to predict where the market is going. For other assets such as FX & commodities there are non-speculative market participants who buy and sell based on their business need. An example from Foreign Exchange is a company such as Google having a stockpile of dollars and needing to pay employees in euros. The end result of these non-speculative market participants is greater price stability because they are always buying or always selling, not because they want to, but because they have to. But since bitcoin is largely a speculative currency (the majority of bitcoin trading volume is the result of speculation, not legitimate commerce) the news has a disproportionate effect on it's prices.
My 2 cents say that this will temporarily depress prices but they will quickly recover because someone such as myself recognizes that those bitcoins haven't entered the market, so nothing has really changed.
But if they set a flat sell price then that'd make a buy (edit: sell) wall (price can not go above this amount until all 25 million have been purchased).
The sell wall could help stabilize the price.
Perhaps I misunderstood you?
Scenario 1:
There is a single large buyer. Assuming the buyer and US goverment are smart, they will recognize the liquidity risk of Bitcoin. The buyer will then get a discount for this and be able to purchase the coins at a below market rate. Assuming their plan is to hold onto the coins for the long term (or at least not short term), I wouldn't expect a large movement in the general Bitcoin markets.
Scenario 2:
There are many small buyers. Each sale would slightly effect the price of Bitcoin as each sale would slowly satisfy demand. The US government might receive $850 per coin for the first sale, but certainly wouldn't for the last sale. This would cause the biggest harm to the market as the price would drop more than in scenario 1.
TL;DR - The US government either needs to accept a lower price for the sake of liquidity or accept that their sales will quickly lower the market rate for Bitcoin.
In other words, it will likely affect both the supply of and demand for Bitcoin.
It is already pretty transparent: http://blockchain.info/
At least they won't sell it via usual exchanges in one go. That would make quite a mess... (bringing price down to ~0 for a while before everything rebalances)
The feds selling the bitcoin would be an endorsement of it and the market they used to sell as being legal. This could push the price up.
Options are derivative products that other people offer. They looks at statistical volatility and price their options, such that they make some $ on average. This means you can short bitcoin, just like anything else - you need to find someone offering the service.
[0] http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/05/betting-against-bi...
I wouldn't doubt they are trying to use their network to get hold of these...
Don't let them get away with it, folks.
Or is your argument based solely on the lack of conviction - which is more worthy of discussion?
