The government of the United States is ready to auction off 29,000 Bitcoins they seized from the Silk Road service when its chief was arrested. According to some estimation, this move could net the government more than $17 million.

Silk Road’s operator was arrested 8 months ago, charged with running the world’s biggest online black market, mostly used to trade drugs and other illegal goods. The coppers seized the website’s assets, along with the Ulbricht’s, at the time of closure. Due to the anonymous nature of the service, main part of those assets was in the cryptocurrency, which ony exists in digital money.

The site operator, Ulbricht, owned about 150,000 Bitcoins, and the Silk Road owned another 30,000. While his own coins remain in the care of the FBI, a forfeiture order was obtained on the Silk Road coins. Those had no nominated owner, and were regarded as the “proceeds of crime”.

Now the US Marshals Service is trying to sell the seized Silk Road coins, which have been broken up into blocks of 3,000 Bitcoins each. The government put out a call to everyone to register as bidders, who have to provide a $200,000 deposit to prove they are legitimate. The initial auction would require bidders to email in a signed scan of their bid form in a blind auction (where they don’t see the bids of the others), and the government chooses the highest submitted price.

At the time when the FBI seized Silk Road’s Bitcoins, the value of one coin was $127, but then the price spiked at almost 10 times that ($1155 per coin), and has now settled at about $588. In any case, the US authorities have still made a profit of $13 million by simply holding on to the Silk Road Bitcoins for a few months. If they could also sell Ulbricht’s personal Bitcoins, the profit would rise to $66m.

Thanks to the public nature of the Bitcoin blockchain, everyone is able to watch the seized money since Silk Road’s closure, and the news of the upcoming auction first emerged when the two accounts that had held Ulbricht’s and the Silk Road’s Bitcoins were cleared out at the same date. Apparently, the money can be found residing in two different wallets, at least until the auction completes.