Is that like a worker at a diamond mine stealing a diamond that he dug out?

I can tell you on authority that wasting time with bitcoin, in any fashion, is very bad for an academic CV.  Only profs with the academic equivalent of a death wish will indulge in it. 

Those are the same graphs available at blockchain.info.
That is lots of numbers, but little information; because we do not know who owns each address, nor what each transaction is for.

I guess there will be bidders, yes.  If someone managed to get one lot for 300$/BTC, right now, he would make a nice profit by selling on the open market, even with slippage and falling prices.

There is no cost for bidding and losing. There is paperwork and hassle and freezing 200'000$ for a month; but there are many people, including "professional" auction bidders, who are not scared by those things.

My guess is that the auction will close quite a bit below market price. That seems to be the rule for government auctions in general.

It is unlikely that it will close above market price, because one can buy 3000 coins on the open market with a bit of patience.

Plus if the current downtrend/volatility continues until the auction, it would be very risky to buy such lots at or above market price.

Large investors who may need (say) 12'000 coins for some startup probably already have bulk sources, that sell at or below market price (e.g. miners), so they probably would not be interested in paying more at the auction.

Probably some of the lots will be bought by speculators who will then try to sell them on the open market, gradually.

That is a different question.  User @rpietila has been trying to estimate the distribution of bitcoin wealth by persons (not addresses).  His current estimate is about 1 million people, but more than half of them are small fish who own 1 BTC or less.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316297.msg7285505#msg7285505
However that estimate is very indirect and therefore dubious. Unfortunately, there is no reliable direct information about that question at all.

Indeed there is not even reliable information about the true amount of bitcoin transfers between different persons per day.  Blockchain.info has plots showing total raffic equivalent to 40 million USD per day, but there is no way to tell how much of it is "fake" (between addresses belonging to the same person).

PS. THIS seems to be a good explanation for the current drop:

CoinDesk, 2014-06-14
Chinese Payments Association Wants Banks to Identify, Eliminate Bitcoin Activity
http://www.coindesk.com/chinese-payments-association-wants-banks-identify-eliminate-bitcoin-activity/

Perhaps, or perhaps it was the GHash.io scare.  But I do not find either explanation convincing.

To understand why the price is falling we would need to understand first why it rose from 450$ (Apr/25--May/20)  to 650$, since this fall is only starting to undo that rise.  That explanation had better explain also why the price rose in a few discrete jumps, due to large concentrated buys, rather than in a steady ramp with broad market support.  Pseudo-explanations like "bitcoin is like that" or TA astrology will not help of course.

As far as I can tell, the rise (like almost all the major moves since October) was generated and powered by the Chinese market, and copied to the "West" by arbitrage.  The spurts could be explained by a few big traders getting inside information of some imminent development with expected positive impact on the Chinese market, such as opening of offshore branches of Huobi and OKCoin, trading in offshore yuan (CNH).

If that is the case, the cause for the current drop should be sought in China too.  Neither the FBI auction nor GHash.io thing could have much impact there.

Anyone who was minimally familiar with how the US government deals with seized property, and had some feeling for the way civil servants think, would have guessed that the sale of the SilkRoad coins would happen, and could tell exactly how it would happen: by public auction, in lots, to the highest bidder, at whatever price he offered.  And indeed several people predicted that in this forum.  There was absolutely no chance that the FBI would sell the seized coins through private deals or on the exchanges, or would try to keep them.  (The US government has no more motivation to own bitcoins than it has to own Apple stock or gold-plated Rolls Royces.) So, their sale must have been "priced in" for months.  Moreover, the amount is not large compared to other bitcoin hoards that could be dumped (it is less than 8 days worth of the miners'  output). 

The GHash.io thing is an obscure technical issue that, per se, does not threaten bitcoin immediately.  (It is far less worrisome, IMHO, than the recent developments at the Shrem Karpeles & Friends Foundation, also known as the Bitcoin Foundation; or than restrictive regulations that large nations might easily pass; or than several other threats.)  I cannot imagine the Chinese traders being impressed by it.

My best guess is that some of those same Chinese insiders who caused the recent rise just got tired of waiting for the expected event, or started doubting the news.  Or other Chinese whales became pessimistic about the solidity of the rise, and decided to dump.

I thought that he was just their PR person?

Who are the people controlling GHash.io?

If GHash.io just turned off or throttled down their equipment, that does not solve the problem, merely hides it.  The risk exists when an entity is capable of doing X% of the hash rate, not only when it does that.

I don't know why people think that the US government is trying to to buy their way into bitcoin, or is scared of it.  They have much cheaper and simpler ways to effectively kill it if they wanted to.  Look at what China already did, without even wanting to ban it ouright.

In fact I believe that the FBI are enthusiastic fans of bitcoin, as it is.  The Silk Road bust must have resulted in several promotions and many cookie points for the agents involved.  There are thousands other FBI agents who must be pining for another opportunity like that: to catch a big illegal business, used and run by naive nerds with no close connections to politicians or drug cartels, with all the necessary evidence in the open blockchain that cannot be challenged in court and that they can get at without wiretapping and warrants...

No, but São Paulo universities are (partly) on strike right now because the management overrun the budget last year with excessive pay rises for profs, and now the State Accounting Tribunal woke up and claimed that payroll should be cut by 30% to comply with statutory limits.  We'll see.

But I don't think that will have an impact on bitcoin price, so still can't see why the sudden gloom.  Bad TA?

Why the sudden gloom?  Price is falling a bit but still way up from April.

Some bad news that I did not see? Karpelès bought GHash.io?  The FBI seized the blockchain?  Satoshi committed seppuku?

By public auction, as with any other seized property:
http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/

I know your manifest purpose is only to provide intentionally excitatory input to the thread in order to overcome the inculcated inhibitions and natural laziness of its readers and liven up the multilateral dialogue with their cathartic responses.  But, just for the record:

* The Huobi order books shown on most charts may be truncated, so one cannot get the real bid depth from them.  On the other hand, I agree that many of the walls that are put up and then removed appear to be fake.

* AFAIK, while bank deposits were closed, deposit through "recharge cards" and withdrawals through bank transfers are still possible. (At least, they are still shown on Huobi's homepage.  Things may have changed in the last few days. Perhaps that last Caixin article had something to do with it?)

Interstingly this caused only a small buzz on Huobi, which is otherwise dormant (03:50 am there).  The price did not change across that blip.  An arbitrage robot, I presume.

If they merely turned off some of their equipment, that does not solve the problem, only hides it.  The risk exists when some entity is capable of doing X% of the hashing, not just when it does so.

I have this notion (please correct me) that government auctions of other kinds of property, such as cars and houses, generally are closed well below the respective market prices.

It seems that the people who bid at government auctions usually include "professionals" who buy only to resell.  Those people place bids significantly below market price; if there are no higher bidders, they have made their day; otherwise they just retrieve their deposit and move on to the next auction.  People who are not "professionals" tend to be scared away by the bureaucratic requirements and the large deposit.

Since there will be some delay between sending the payment and receiving the coins, the bidders will also have to factor into their bids the likelihood of the market price falling in that interval and then taking months to recover. 

In summary, it is by no means assured that the auction will close above market. I rather expect the opposite.

But there are 4000 new coins mined per day, totally clean.  Why would those 30'000 coins from the FBI (8 days' worth of mining) make such a difference?