This was answered in the comments of the link sent previously, but basically: it's gone to a public blockchain address, of which everyone knows the public key but only its owner knows the private one. Also, the blockchain is pseudonymous, so nobody knows who the owner of the address is.

Therefore, everyone knows where the ether are, but only its owner can touch it. He can use them as if they were legitimately obtained (they are, depending on perspective) and go to an exchange to buy dollars (or euros or whatever), or exchange them with other addresses for goods and services.

Anyone will be able to audit these movements of money (at least the ones that stay inside the ether blockchain), although there exist some cryptocurrency laundering schemes.

Thank you.

Here is what exactly happened https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4os7l5/the_big_th...

I don't claim to be the smartest of software developers, but I have been around in software development for more than a decade and I have been able to grasp most of the technical articles that I read out of curiosity. But I have to admit, the past few days I have read a bunch of articles around this, including this one, which try to make it simpler to understand, but I still don't have a grasp of the basic concepts around this :) Makes me wonder, are there enough people out there, who really know how this works and how to develop for such applications.

I hope this podcast helps...https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-297-...

please let me know if it does/doesn't

I don't believe any gold was involved.

lol if you think that gold has any real value

If you can sell it,then it has value

To be pedantic, economists use the word value in a specific way. It is how much you can gain or benefit from something.

Price is what you can sell something for.

So gold has both value (you can use it as a commodity), and it has a price (you can sell it in exchange for currency).

Worth is another one: it's a mostly subjective, philosophical judgement.

So technically, I could sell something that has no value; and something which has no agreed upon price can have value. Everyone can then disagree about what that something is worth.