Feds to sell $28 million in seized Bitcoins | Fox News

The U.S. government announced plans to sell a whopping $28 million worth of bitcoins, the volatile digital currency that’s taking the Internet by storm.

Bitcoins are a form of currency, like the U.S. dollar, the British pound or the Indian Rupee. But Bitcoins aren’t tied to any country or even to physical paper or coins at all. Instead, computers “mint” them according to complex algorithms, adding a new coin to a database at a slow but steady rate.

The currency’s exchange rate has seen wide swings, soaring up from about $125 U.S. dollars per bitcoin to over $1,000 apiece in late December. They currently trade for around $800.

And the Feds will soon sell a massive stash.

He called Silk Road "a global cyber business designed to broker criminal transactions." The website is believed to have collected more than $1 billion in revenue from more than 100,000 customers.

"These bitcoins were forfeited not because they are bitcoins, but because they were, as the court found, the proceeds of crimes,"