It’s an exciting week for Bitcoin: Wallets, and botnets, and even pirates await cryptocurrency enthusiasts on the rolling high seas of the Internet.

The biggest news for today is the FBI raid and shutdown of the online black market Silk Road—including the apparent confiscation of almost 26,000 BTC from a man alleged to be the infamous “Dread Pirate Roberts.” The creator of the 3D-printed gun “Liberator” has come out with an announcement about a new type of Bitcoin wallet. And, Symantec shut down ZeroAccess, a giant botnet geared to do Bitcoin mining.

Feds raid Silk Road, confiscate $3.6 million in bitcoins

Infamous online black market site Silk Road has been raided by the FBI, sized the domain, and arrested the alleged “Dread Pirate Roberts.” According to a release by the Justice Department Ross William Ulbricht, 29, was arrested in San Francisco Wednesday morning for his alleged connection to the black market site.

Along with the seizure of the domain (leaving behind the now-recognizable series of seals with “THIS HIDDEN SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED”) although how that seizure worked is unknown currently. Since Silk Road is hidden within the “Deep Web” and accessible only via the anonymity network Tor, it’s possible that the servers themselves have been compromised and therefore are not accessible or some other method was used.

“From in or about January 2011, up to and including September 2013, the Silk Road Hidden Website… has served as an online marketplace where illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services have been regularly bought and sold by the site’s users,” court papers filed in the Southern District of New York state.

The complaint by the FBI estimates that Silk Road has processed transactions worth over a total of 9.5 million Bitcoins, which makes $1.2 billion in sales. According to information released by prosecutors, Ulbricht was in possession of approximately 26,000 Bitcoins, worth around $3.6m–the largest seizure of Bitcoins to date.

The Silk Road has long been a site surrounded by an air of mythology and mystery and as a black market for illicit goods, including drugs and criminal activity. Using an anonymity service, this enabled it to run without much interference or easy tracking by law enforcement (of course they could access it anyway so they could watch.) As a result of the digital-only and nearly anonymous nature of Bitcoin the clients of Silk Road likely gravitated towards the cryptocurrency—it would have quickly become a currency-of-trade secondary only to the US dollar.

The complaint is an amazing read including a section on Bitcoin, the transactions done by Silk Road, and even a bio of our alleged “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Take a look at the complaint over at the TIME.com article on the subject. It includes commentary about how agents followed Ulbricht (calling him DPR) through VPNs, saw him chatting on forums such as Bitcoin Talk, and eventually caught him using “forged identity documents.”

Silk Road is just the most famous Dark Web black market, and with the Feds taking it offline its denizens will find yet-another Mos Eisley of the Internet to scuttle to.

Symantec, ZeroAccess botnet, and bitcoin mining

Bitcoin exists in an interesting space as a currency: it’s one of the few that can actually be earned via computation. As a result, hijacking GPU or CPU cycles to become part of the Bitcoin accounting protocol (also called mining) could seem pretty lucrative for ambitious malware writers who also write peer-to-peer communicating Trojans or happen to control a brace of zombie machines.

The ZeroAccess botnet will likely become the classic example of this sort of behavior by cybercriminals and Symantec recently dealt a massive blow to that botnet—but not before researching exactly how it worked and how it was used. The interest of the Bitcoin community isn’t the infection method or the click fraud potential, but the Bitcoin mining operation it ran.

Out of interest, we took some old hardware that we had lying around in the office to test what kind of impact the ZeroAccess botnet would have in terms of energy usage and the economics of these activities. We looked at both click fraud and bitcoin mining but focussed on the bitcoin mining because it is potentially the most intensive activity undertaken by the bots and has a direct economic value to the botmaster. We infected the test lab computers with ZeroAccess and then set them bitcoin mining, we also had a clean control computer that was just allowed to idle. We hooked the computers up to power meters to see the amount of power being consumed by the test computers. The results make for some interesting reading.

A machine with a Pentium D 945 3.4GHz (and 2GB of RAM) the researchers discovered that a single machine could run the ZeroAccess malware and via Bitcoin mining net approximately $0.41 a year. However, multiplied by 1.9 million bots—growing and shrinking depending on infection rates and attrition—that tiny jingle of change suddenly becomes a tsunami of beau coup bucks. The estimate maximum average at 1.9 million bots (assuming a lot of things) came out to $2,165 produced a day from mining alone.

ZeroAccess is probably not alone in placing itself into the Bitcoin mining protocol for cybercriminals to make money.

The ironic thing about this behavior is that while it makes the Trojan botnet controllers money, these botnets serve to further distribute the system that keeps BTC accounted for and secure. Not exactly the way that most Bitcoin enthusiasts would like to see it secured—but the botnets themselves are certainly no threat to the Bitcoin protocol or its stability.

Creator of the 3D printed gun “Liberator” looks to revolutionize Bitcoin wallets

A piece running in The New Yorker outlines a project started by Cory Wilson—best known as the creator of the “Liberator”, a 3D printable gun—to produce a better Bitcoin wallet for people who want something safe, simple, and now. Open-source, free to use, and potentially something as simple as a plug-in that hooks directly into Firefox or Chrome.

Wilson and Taaki’s project, tentatively known as Dark Wallet, is a simple wallet designed to be easier to use for people who aren’t tech-savvy; they hope that in turn accelerates the currency’s rate of adoption around the world. The wallet will be open-source and free to use. Eventually, Wilson and Taaki hope to create a vast stable of Bitcoin-related tools.

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Unlike many current Bitcoin wallets, which can be difficult to download and cumbersome to use, Wilson and Taaki are designing Dark Wallet, they told me, as an easy-to-install plug-in that sits discreetly on users’ Chrome or Firefox browsers. Made for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, Dark Wallet would move most of the energy-sucking process of insuring there’s only one of each bitcoin in circulation, and that they aren’t spent in two places at the same time, to separate servers.

The market for more wallets is certainly large, but it’s hard to say that the current stock are altogether that hard to use. For example, Armory—spotlit in the September 18th Bitcoin Weekly—isn’t hard to install and doesn’t have a poor user experience. And, from reading the article, it sounds more-or-less like the “Dark Wallet” concept is just going to host the wallet in the cloud and not on the client’s computer.

There are also cloud- and web-hosted wallets out there such as Coinbase. It’s hard to see so far what will distinguish this “Dark Wallet” from a standard web-wallet that runs through a Chrome plug-in.

No doubt we’ll know more as the anticipated release date in February 2014 approaches.