Is there anyone strong-minded enough to dare unwatch this thread before reading its last post?

I see.  Well, if you had nothing to do with CryptoRush, then you have nothing to fear, of course.  He will not make accusations to the police that he knows are not true; that would backfire, badly.

If @PhoneBloks did not intend to blackmail you, but was merely demanding that you return what he thought you had stolen from him, he could not have picked a worse way of doing it.

It would be prudent to find his real identity now, or he may try blackmailing other people with other accusations, under other pseudonyms.

I should know better and stay away from a thread that reads like a bar fight between drunken people.  But can't resist...  Here is the summary as I understood from the posts:

* CryptoRush.in collapsed in mysterious (but hardly original) circumstances.
* Lots of people, it seems, lost money in that incident.
* CryptoRush got sold by its anonymous owners to other anonymous people.
* The new CR owners have not yet reimbursed the clients for their losses.
* Original poster @PhoneBloks tried to identify the former CR owners, fingered two people.
* One accused user, @Devianttwo, admits being a co-owner of CR, but refused to identify the other owners at first.
* The other accused user, @KeyserSozeMC/@ThisWeeksCoin, denies being ex-co-owner.
* @Devianttwo is ambiguous about the connection of @KeyserSozeMC/@ThisWeeksCoin with CR.
* @Devianttwo reveals that a certain @Linkanzelda was the main co-owner of CR until the hack.
* @KeyserSozeMC/@ThisWeeksCoin accuses @PhoneBlocks of blackmail and gets him banned from forum.

I cannot find fault with the original poster's attempts to identify the ex-owners of CR.  Individual clients of a company can expect to have their privacy protected, but the owners of any business open to  the general public cannot expect that.  Even if there had been no collapse, the CryptoRush clients would have the moral right to know the identities of the people to whom they were entrusting their money and coins.  

After the collapse and losses, that right becomes a legal one.  If any CR client goes to court (and there seem to be sufficient cause for for that), he will surely obtain a subpoena to know the real names of the co-owners.  So why not come clear on that here?

And I am quite perplexed by the indifference of the admins to the banning of the original poster.  His language did not help to attract sympathy, but the tone of the responses wasn't much better, either.

If the ban was an automatic consequence of the Trust system, then that system is clearly broken.

I admit that there may be some truth in that.  My first reactions when I heard about bitcoin, touted to be the investment that would make everyone a millionnaire, were "if it sounds too good to be true, it surely ain't" and "oh no, here we go again - another TelexFree".  My view of bitcoin has not improved as a result of knowing more about it, quite the opposite; but perhaps my probabilities are still biased by my earlier public position, as you say.

Anyway, I don't see why my stubborness should bother people so much.  The longer I persist in my negative view, the greater will be your fun when I will be finally proved wrong. 

The only book I made some money out of was my Ph.D. thesis, published by Academic Press and now out of print . I got perhaps 15.000 US$ in royalties from the publisher, spread over several years.  However, considering that writing it took me the equivalent of 2-3 years of full-time work (also spread over some 7 years, interspersed with other research), I would be a fool if I had done it for the money.

I did not get an extra dime of royalties for any of the papers and reports that I wrote since then.  Journal publishers pay no royalties to authors, but writing papers is considered a requirement of my job (the "publish or perish" principle).

I think that a critical story of Bitcoin this far would make a very interesting book actually.  But it would take another kind of author to make best use of the juicy parts.

And if the price does go above 580$ I owe you nothing? It's a deal, I happen to have 0 BTC to spare. Oops, looks like you already won, contratulations. 

Yes, he must include that forced delay in his estimate of how much money he would get if he got those coins.  It is irrelevant for the optimistic bidder, very important for the pessimistic bidder.

If I were bidding at such a sealed-bid auction, I would try to estimate (a) how much revenue I could get from the item if I got it, and (b) what is the minimum profit that I would be happy with on my investment. Then I would bid for the difference (a) minus (b).

For example, I am currently pessimistic about the chances of the price ever getting much higher than now, and expect a downtrend in the short term.  Therefore, if I were to get those bitcoins I would try to sell them right away for the best price, as fast as I could.  If the auction were today, I would expect to get maybe 550 USD/BTC average from selling 3000 coins on the exchanges over the next week.  Thus, I would bid for 500 USD/BTC to have an expected profit of 150'000$ with an investment of 1'500'000$.

By the same reasoning, someone with a more optimistic outlook may bid higher than market.  If he expects BTC to be 10'000 USD next year, then he can bid at 5'000 USD/BTC and still expect to make a nice profit.  But if such person existed, he would be buying all coins in the market now, at any price.  Obviously the optimists are all out of money now.

I suppose that one can build more sophisticated probabilistic models to find one's optimum bid, given one's expectations about future bitcoin prices.  However, one must assume a very broad probability distribution for the other people's bids, so I doubt that one can do much better than the simplistic method above.

The auction mechanism is clearly described in the USMS note.  Each bidder submits one "sealed" bid where he says "I will buy up to N blocks of 3000 BTC for X dollars each, and up to M blocks of 2,656.51306529 for Y dollars each", where N is between 0 and 9, and M is 0 or 1.  When the bidding period is over, the USMS "opens" the bids, and awards the blocks of each type to the bidders, by decreasing bid price, until all blocks are awarded.

It appears that the USMS will not release any results to the public:  http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf It will only tell losing bidders that they lost.  But perhaps the terminally curious will file a FOIA request.

And they felt it was necessary to write So you will not get a refund if you buy those bitcoins and they turn out to be counterfeited, or half of their bits fall off after the first transaction.  

There is no "starting price".  Each bidder submits one sealed bid, for 1 to 10 lots of coins, and that is it.  The USMS may cancel the auction at their discretion, presumably including if if they get only "joke" bids, but I haven't seen any explicit minimum price in their announcement. http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/

For whatever it's worth, the male-to-female ratio for users of this forum is 4.4 to 1:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

The Original Post story smells of a scam. I bet that the "bitcoin buyer" runs a clandestine moving company, and that is how he gets his free manpower: he pretends to buy bitcoins for cash, then hacks into Coinbase to delay the transfer... Of course he paid for the coins the next day: that is not where he gets his profit, and it is not easy to find bitcoin sellers in passable physical shape.  Besides, I bet that the bitcoin price was 10% up when he finally paid, at the old price of course.  I wonder if he would have shown up if the price had been down 10%...

(Do I need to put a "" here?)

Indeed.  And the only user who got banned by the forum admins is the one who tried to identify the people responsible for the loss of his money. 

But, like the "our exchange got hacked, sorry folks" line, this finale too is in the script of the Standard Exchange Scam play.

The smiley is out of place here... I would guess that more bitcoin exchanges have turned out to be scams than the opposite.   

Because a miner has to pay large regular bills for electricity, staff, maintenance etc., which will not wait.

Also he would seek a long-term contract with a buyer, at a fixed BTC price, before investing millions in equipment; and that would almost certainly be below the current market price, if the other party is minimally prudent.

Freshly mined coins are almost as good, aren't they?  So we may get a clue from the price that miners get in private sales.  Are there any examples known?

(The government may perhaps harass an investor for buying from a certain miner that they don't like, but if the government failed to blacklist that miner beforehand, the investor would have good defense in court.  Like trading with some unfriendly government before trading sanctions are in place -- one cannot get prosecuted for that.)

However, note that the "cleanliness" of those auctioned coins extends only to the acquisition by the winning bidder.  Once the coins are out of government's custody, they are not substantially different from any other coins.  If that bidder is later found to be a criminal, those coins may be seized again, especially if he paid the USMS with revenue from crimes.  If someone else buys some coins from him before this second seizure,  those coins would be no "cleaner" than coins bought from DPR before the SR bust.

There is no way of telling how many bidders there will be and what will be the winning bid.  At this point, I would guess 10% probability that any given bidder will get any coins at all.

So, buying at the auction cannot be part of any strategic planning.  For the bidders, it will be an opportunistic shot in the dark -- may provide juicy extra gain if it succeeds, but most likely it will not, so the bidder would have to plan for business as usual.  The main impact would be for the "poorest" bidders who will have to set aside the auction money until the bids are opened, and thus may be forced postpone their regular buys.

But has the court cleared that auction yet?

(I know that DPR hasn't exhausted the appeals yet, but I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the court had authorized the auction, with the understanding that DPR would be refunded in dollars if he wins on appeal.  Is this correct?)

If that auction has to wait for the appeals, then it may be a long way off -- a year, maybe?

Coindesk non vuole ammettere l'importanza del mercato cinese per il prezzo del bitcoin.

Si capisce: una venture che dipenda dal prezzo del bitcoin, come il fondo SMBIT della SecondMarket o un fabbricante di ASIC per minerazione, difficilmente  troverebbe investitori e clienti se ammettesse che il valore dei suoi titoli dipende dallo stato di spirito di alcune migliaia di piccoli negozianti e lavoratori negli antipodi che non hanno nessuna utilità per il bitcoin oltre che come articolo per day-trading.  Un stato di spirito che può cambiare radicalmente da un momento all'altro.  E sono queste imprese che pagano la spesa e rendita di Coindesk, e degli altri mezzi di informazione del "mondo Bitcoin".

Quasi tutte i grandi cambiamenti di prezzo dal dicembre 2013 in qua sono stati causati da fatti in Cina che hanno importanza solo pei cinesi, come i decreti della Banca del Popolo Cinese e le successive chuisure dei mezzi di deposito di yuan delle borse per scambio BTC/CNY.  Dall'altra parte, sembra che fatti di grande rilievo per il bitcoin fuori China non abbiano nessun effetto nel suo prezzo. 

Ma ci creda chi vuole...

Huobi's charts, only, have been lagging increasingly over the last day; now they are 14 hours (!) out of date. 

It must be a problem with their chart data server.  Some hours ago I checked the chart on their own website and it was up-to-date.  Indeed itheir price tracked the OKCoin price very closely through some large swings, only a few CNY above or below.

The USMS does hire private companies to do part of the work in some cases; e.g. they may hand over seized cars to a  private car storage company for safekeeping, and interested bidders will inspect them there.  I am not sure, but think that they may even hire a private company to run the whole auction. (Perhaps for art works, jewelry, etc?) 

But they would have to run a bidding process anyway to select the auctioning company, and write a complicated contract with them.  In the case of bitcoins, the total hassle and paperwork would be much higher than directly auctioning the bitcoins by sealed-bid (which is a well-tested routine for them).

Non credo che la vendita avrà molto effetto nel prezzo, e non credo che il ribasso degli ultimi giorni sia dovuto al suo annunzio.  Per me, dal 2013 sono i speculatori Cinesi a decidere il prezzo del bitcoin, e loro se ne fregano di quello che succede fuori dalla Cina.  Le cause dei grandi cambiamenti di prezzo si devono cercare lì.  (Solo nelle borse Huobi e OKCoin, e solo ieri, 80'000 bitcoin hanno cambiato mani.  Pure contando che la sessa moneta può essere comperata e venduta molte volte nello stesso giorno, si vede che 30'000 bitcoin non é una cifra smisurata per il mercato Cinese.)