Immediately after the news broke that Silk Road had been shut down by the FBI and its owner had been arrested, a sharp decline in the price of Bitcoin. Bitcoins were the site's primary trading currency, accounting for the majority of all cryptocurrency transactions.
Ross William Ulbricht, who was arrested, may well be one of the richest people in the world. The website is said to have earned around 600,000 Bitcoins in commissions over the past two years. However, only 26,000 Bitcoins were seized from Ulbricht.
Shortly after the website was shut down, the price of bitcoins on the popular Mt.Gox plummeted from 103 euros to 81, but then recovered slightly and reached 92 euros. The result will not be permanent, of course, as we have seen before. It is quite understandable and perhaps expected given that Silk Road represented a very large repository and distributor of Bitcoins.
There are, of course, many Bitcoin fans who are very excited about the closure of the illegal website. They believe that this will help Bitcoin gain the legitimacy it deserves, as one by one the big names who used the cryptocurrency for illegal transactions are getting out of the “game.”
