rd to the testimony regarding the evidence
supporting an inference that Bitcoins on
the Silk Road servers were transferred to
Ulbricht’s laptop. The defense opened on
a theory that the Bitcoins in Ulbricht’s
possession were from some sort of Bitcoi
n speculation (and, thus, not connected to
Silk Road). It was reasonable to expect
that defendant had performed the very
comparison the Government then scrambled to perform. That the Government
presented the facts of such a comparison
is nothing more than meeting a defense
argument. It would have been surprising
had the Government not done this. Thus,
the facts as to what Bitcoins—a highly
traceable digital currency—were on the Silk
Road servers, and whether there was a factua
l basis to infer transfer to Ulbricht’s
laptop, was a door the defens
e opened at the outset.
http://ia600603.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.422824/gov.uscourts.nysd.422824.173.0.pdf
these are the words from the federal judge btw
We must keep in mind here that the government has both the sending and receiving computers and the corresponding secret keys for both the sending and receiving wallets. They are trying in this situation to link the coins that were sent from the SR servers to the coins in the defendant's computer. My thought is that replacing XBT with XMR would not help the defendant in this situation since in the XMR case the government would still be able to use the corresponding view keys to provide evidence of the transactions to the court. This is actually quite properly by design.