Report: Leaked U.S. Marshals list may reveal Silk Road bitcoin bidders

Last week, the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) announced the auction of roughly 30,000 bitcoin seized from the Silk Road online marketplace. With a deposit of $200,000 required to bid, the auction was effectively open only to institutional-level buyers. Given the closed-envelope nature of the auction itself, the odds of finding the names of the bidders seemed remote at best. If a leaked email to bidders from the USMS turns out to be legitimate, however, the identities of those buyers is no longer a secret.

According to a report on CoinDesk, the email was sent by the USMS to update bidders on changes to the auction details. Making that most classic of mass-email mistakes, the staffer sent the email CC rather BCC, allowing all recipients to see the other email addresses.

The list includes:

The list of names includes:

• Daniel Folkinshteyn, assistant professor at Rowan University
• Barry Silbert, CEO for SecondMarket
• Luther Lowe, director of public policy for Yelp
• Malcolm Oluwasanmi, chairperson of Little Phoenix Investment Group
• Fabrice Evangelista, quantitative arbitrage at BNP Paribas
• Michal Handerhanm, co-founder and COO of Bitcoin Shop
• Dave Goel, managing general partner of Matrix Capital Management
• Dinuka Samarasinghe, investment professional
• Chris DeMuth Jr., Wrangeley Capital
• Fred Ehrsam, co-founder, Coinbase
• Jonathan Disner, corporate counsel at DRW Trading Group
• William Brindise, head investment manager at DigitalBTC
• Michael Moro, director at SecondMarket
• Jennifer R. Jacoby, lawyer at WilmerHale
• Sam Lee, co-founder, Bitcoins Reserve
• Avarus Corporation

If accurate, the list represents a growing interest in bitcoin by mainstream investors. BNP Paribas, for instance, is a French bank controlling nearly $2 trillion in assets, while David Goel is a well-known tech investor and hedge fund manager. With nearly $18 million in bitcoin available, this may also be the last major opportunity for institutional buyers like SecondMarket and Coinbase to buy large amount of bitcoin without heavily influencing the price.

CoinDesk noted that other emails, also attributed to the USMS, have since said that the leaked list only represented interested parties, and did not necessarily represent those who have paid deposits for the June 27 auction.