Not going to comment on the murder part as that’s well discussed here.
I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings. Given the anonymous nature handling bots spamming fake reviews would be even harder to catch here, and you ultimately don’t know who ended up addicted/hooked/DUI’s etc from the easy availability this provided. I’m not sure the total effects could ever be qualified, but it’s not like unadulterated drugs are automatically safe. Just look at how many lives pharma-grade opioids ruined, even though they were “safe”.
That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.
I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
For LSD there existed a third-party forum, where a group of (supposedly) vendor-neutral, unaffiliated individuals would purchase samples from vendors, send them to private or state-sponsored labs around the world and publish/discuss the results (often with online links to lab results).
Yes, of course vendors could have also attempted to infiltrate these forums. But as enough of these functions were provided by/for the community, the profit incentive tilts. If you ran a vendor account on the Silk Road, your effort was better spent maintaining/improving good infosec and mail/postal security. Some techniques they developed were quite innovative, the professionalism was evident.
Ross’s story is fascinating and tragic- as everything that’s said for and against his character is generally true. Silk Road was built on naive yet admirable ideals. It fostered a special community, some of which really did reflect those ideals. He got in over his head, and really did try to have someone killed.
Though, the details on that latter point are a bit more complicated- authorities had infiltrated Ross’s inner circle- the motive and the ‘hitman’ himself were fictional. Ross still took the bait though, which is pretty damning. Until that point, they weren’t sure they had a sufficient case on him.
Is that why they never prosecuted the attempted murder? It sounds like entrapment.
That's the point people don't seem to be getting about anonymous reviews- if the review is more costly than the value it provides the seller, they won't do it, and it's fairly easy to make that the case. A separate enthusiast forum where the reviews are from people with a long history of high effort engagement is a good example of that. That's basically the idea behind crypto as well- making false transactions is more expensive than the value it could return.
The truth is no one knows why they didn't bring those charges, or the real details behind the evidence or what happened in those interactions. It's pretty much shrouded beneath things like:
-DOJ released some details and screenshots, but
-the FBI agents who were involved in investigating this topic were like arrested for stealing bitcoin from silk road or something, so their work is hard to find credible
-general lack of clarity as to the identity of the person running silk road at the time this happened
The law is murky and seems to hinge on the court's opinion on whether the person who committed the crime would have had they not been influenced by an officer. The police being the ones to start the conversation doesn't rise to the level of entrapment. The police deceiving you into wanting to commit a crime may rise to the level of entrapment if the courts find you wouldn't have done it otherwise (the example I found that illustrated this best was "Hey there's a warehouse full of valuables let's go rob it" isn't entrapment but "Hey this guy said he's gonna kill your kid you need to kill him first" probably does absent any reason to believe you would have killed him without being deceived first). My guess would be that the grey area, plus the relative ease with which they were able to secure a life sentence for the other charges, is why the murder-for-hire charges never went to trial.
> the example I found that illustrated this best was "Hey there's a warehouse full of valuables let's go rob it" isn't entrapment
Literally entrapment.
Like you said, it hinges on if you would have committed the crime without encouragement from the police.
A trap car is not entrapment. You walking past a trap car, checking if the door is unlocked and then going for a joyride / stealing it means you convinced yourself to do this crime.
An undercover policeman telling you he's seen an unlocked car, and "just take it for a spin, for the hell of it"? That's entrapment.
>By a 5–3 margin, the Court upheld the conviction of a Missouri man for selling heroin even though all the drug sold was supplied to him, he claimed, by a Drug Enforcement Administration informant who had, in turn, gotten it from the DEA. The majority held that the record showed Hampton was predisposed to sell drugs no matter his source...The case came before the court when the defendant argued that while he was predisposed, it was irrelevant since the government's possible role as sole supplier in the case constituted the sort of "outrageous government conduct" that Justice William Rehnquist had speculated could lead to the reversal of a conviction in the court's last entrapment case, United States v. Russell.[2] Rehnquist was not impressed and rejected the argument in his majority opinion.
Here's one where the government said "Hey you should sell this heroin that I gave you" and the conviction was upheld because "the record showed Hampton was predisposed to sell drugs no matter his source." So no, the simple act of an undercover cop asking you if you'd like to commit a crime isn't entrapment on its face.
> In late February 1974, Hampton and a DEA informant known as Hutton were playing pool at the Pud bar in St. Louis when Hampton noticed the needle marks on Hutton's arms. He said he needed money and could obtain heroin to sell. Hutton responded that he could find a buyer. After the conversation, he called his handler, DEA agent Terry Sawyer, and reported the proposal.
It was under his own will, the DEA just supplied him the means to do so.
It's basically as if I was in a seedy bar and spot a pistol on an undercover agent, and I tell them I know an easy spot to rob near the bar. Then the undercover agent gives me the pistol, asking for 20% of the take. It only turns into entrapment if I was talking about money problems and the undercover agent would have told me robbing a nearby convienence store could be an easy solve to my money troubles.
My understanding is that they did not charge him with the attempted murder because it was later found that both parties/witnesses (other than Ross) later turned out to be corrupt and financially benefitting from the situation (keeping his murder payment for themselves) and the Silk Road in general.
Entrapment requires some coercive/persuasive force by the government to push you to commit the crime, the government is allowed to setup entirely fake scenarios and let you choose to do a crime.
Not that it's a perfect source, but reddit lawyers used to describe the difficulty of proving entrapment by laying out two requirements: (1) you wouldn't have committed the crime if the instigator wasn't law enforcement, and (2) you only committed the crime because the instigator was law enforcement. One or the other is not enough. Like an 'if and only if' deal.
If you aren't aware that it's an LEO urging you on, I don't see why you should be able to argue impropriety. You made the decision as if it were real and would have real consequences.
If someone comes to you and offers you a fictional job to illegally move a lot of drugs for cash and you agree - that's not entrapment, you agreed of your own accord. That the whole thing was a fake setup is not materially relevant.
If you first refuse, and then the undercover officer says "if you don't do this we'll come after you and kill your family" and then you agree under duress - that's entrapment.
It has to be something that's compelling you to do something you would not have done otherwise. Presenting you with the option to make a bad choice is not itself enough because had the situation been real you would have done it.
On one hand I'm sympathetic to Ross in that I can empathize with his youthful ideals and ego that drove the marketplace, but I also think he genuinely would have authorized that person be killed had it been real and people are in prison for a lot less. His market was also a lot more than drugs iirc.
I find his supporters downplaying the assassination bit irritating - I suspect they do it because they know it's the least defensible bit and they can argue it on technicality. I think it'd be better if they just accepted it.
I also think he's very unlikely to commit another crime now that he's out, but still - a lot of people are in prison for a lot less.
Depends a lot on the exact setup. He still chose to try to hire a hitman allegedly. The standard is fairly high, "that man is informing on you" isn't entrapment, without knowing a lot of details it's hard to know and it's rarely actually entrapment.
Built on naive yet admirable ideals? Special community? It was the world’s largest drug market, selling things like fentanyl in large quantities. What admirable ideal is this?!
You really cannot stop illicit drug use. A hard approach to prohibition not only makes people less safe, it’s a massive waste of spending. On just a pragmatic level- Fentanyl and analogues are by weight hundreds of times more potent than morphine. How do you even effectively stop that from getting across borders? Silk Road provided a brief counterpoint, and ideally wouldn’t have had to exist. The ideals it represented were more broad- for drug regulations/spending that focus on safety, and respect individual rights / bodily autonomy (ofc limited to not harming or endangering others).
The Silk Road represented a tiny fraction of illicit drug revenue per country. Some report-skimming would indicate less than a single digit. A series of more profit-oriented darknet markets replaced it. I don’t know what the costs were associated with its takedown but they must have been enormous. I doubt it became large enough for cartels to care much, but the effect of shutting it down is certainly good for them.
I don’t personally hold the opinion that Ross Ulbricht shouldn’t have been pursued according to the law- or support his pardon- or even that darknet drug markets should exist! I’m also not really interested in crypto.
However I strongly believe that a completely different approach to drug laws & regulations is necessary to make people safer and reduce crime.
Oh, I like that, tough on crime! It's a novel idea. I wish the Nixon and Reagan administrations had thought of that a few decades ago, maybe if they did we could be witnessing the brilliant effects of that sort of policy today!
Amazing idea! After all, giving long term prison sentences to drug dealers, and even drug users, has totally eliminated drug use, it's not like it has exploded over time...
Separating the drugs from the adjacent crime and problems that come with an illicit industry by finding a way to make it run kinda like normal business seems pretty admirable to me.
It’s cheaper than the alternative, though, if there is rat poison in it, there is nothing you can do!
Caveat Emptor is a shit way to run a society. It incentivizes the sociopaths.
Both Hippies and Libertarians fail to understand that if your organizational principles don’t account for sociopaths, they will take over and ruin everything.
>It’s cheaper than the alternative, though, if there is rat poison in it, there is nothing you can do!
Sure there is, I can take you to court.
>Caveat Emptor is a shit way to run a society. It incentivizes the sociopaths.
Bureaucracy and nanny states do that too.
>Both Hippies and Libertarians fail to understand that if your organizational principles don’t account for sociopaths, they will take over and ruin everything.
I don't think the latter are against locking people up. Or executing them even!
And the former, I dunno, perhaps they handle them Midsommar style!
Not to mention the issue is quite solvable: sellers can sell whatever, but need to specify the contents and whether they match a specification (e.g. same contents as aspirin). If you want to buy rat poison drug or heroin cut with sawdust, it's on you.
Courts can do very little to remedy the harm of dying from rat poison. They can address, in an imperfect way, the incidental harm your death by rat poison causes to other people, but, I think most people would strongly prefer not to die of rat poison, than to die of rat poison but have their dependents compensated financially for the loss of their future income, etc.
Something anyone with an addict in their life needs to know:
While substances can efficiently help someone destroy their life, keeping them away from drugs won’t stop them from destroying their lives. There’s something already broken in these people that they need to fix before it’s too late.
There are perfectly legal alternatives that can be just as effective with a little more effort. Putting heroin in your arm is just quicker than downing a fifth of vodka, or chasing dopamine at the dog track.
I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.
Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.
Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.
The important question isn't raw numbers, it's which destroys a greater percentage of lives out of those who consume it. If heroin were as widespread as alcohol, would it still be true that alcohol destroys more lives? We obviously can't know for sure without trying it, but preliminary results aren't promising.
Yeah, I don't know. There's certainly people that are just broken, but reading other examples, I think there are plenty of people who just happen on to a perfect addiction(, or maybe an imperfect one that fills the spot). The manifest destiny stuff is kind of a mix that soothes a lot of people with various motives whether or not it is representative of the median case.
> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
He's the candidate that was preferred by Christians, yet probably he was the least Christian-like candidate. Just today/yesterday he criticized a Bishop for values that are clearly Christian, people seem to swallow it. I'm pretty sure trying to add logic/reasoning to the choices he makes is a lost cause.
> Ulbricht stopped selling them because it wasn't lucrative enough.
While technically accurate, the tone of the Ulbricht quote differs somewhat:
The volume hasn't even been enough to cover server costs and is actually waning at this point. I had high hopes for it, but if we are going to serve an anonymous weapons market, I think it will require more careful thought an planning.
There's a reason Wikipedia doesn't accept "I saw it" as a citation.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, but if I had to put odds on Wikipedia vs "rando on internet forum who claims to remember something from years ago", I'm going with Wikipedia 10 times out of 10.
"Facebook is a communication tool for friends and family that is sometimes used for illegal activity" is categorically different than "Silk Road is a tool created to facilitate illegal activity."
There are many Christians who would happily to get in long arguments over which values are “clearly Christian.”
If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging. And that’s what stops people who don’t understand it. Try chatting with an LLM sometime about what it looks like from their perspective. Knowing it’s not a human makes it easier to avoid getting upset.
> If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging
I was brought up Christian, sealed my religiousness with a confirmation when I was 15 (which required studies and field trips), and been around religious people for a lot of my younger life. Oh, and my mom worked at a church where I grew up, spent a bunch of time in the church, for better or worse.
I'd like to think that the values of compassion and mercy are two of the most fundamental Christian values, at least from the protestants I spent a lot of time with. It seems to me, that the American bastardization of Catholicism, might not actually be very Christian if those two values aren't include in there.
I'm not religious anymore, but if I learned anything from (truly) religious folks, then it would be that you should treat your fellow humans as just that, fellow humans.
Well, he just did an executive order to label cartels as foreign terrorists, and has spoken at length about drugs in many of his speeches. Not sure why you think such a statement is controversial.
Because I don't think he has a honestly held belief about anything. I think he's happy to do whatever is most expedient for his interests.
He wants to be known as a guy who trades favors, so here, he ignored all the previous fear mongering about [scary thing], and is repaying the favor to the "libertarian party" who wanted this, and voted for him.
Almost everything he says is just for show, fits his pattern of behavior better than, "he believes [thing he said]" does.
I just read another article about how the person who says we need to follow "law and order" and "respect police" just pardoned everybody convicted of violence against police... again, trading favors instead of consistently following something he said.
I replied with more details in a sister thread but calling it a schtick is more accurate that I think you meant. It's exclusively a shtick; he doesn't actually believe it, or care about it.
Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.
The Mexican government has a long history of this. The LAPD’s (well documented for over 50 years) do the same thing.
Trump is a convicted felon with lots of ties to organized crime. Nothing about him pardoning members of some criminal organizations but not others is surprising.
In related news, he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed, and in the same day pardoned 132 of his supporters that were convicted of assaulting police officers during an event where officers were killed.
>he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed
He also pardoned a drug dealing cop killer at the end of his last term. Said cop killer has since been arrested for attempting to strangle his wife to death.
> Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.
For reference, Rudy Giuliani was lauded as the anti-organized mayor that brought down the Italian mob in New York, but ultimately was flagged as actually being an upper echelon of Russian organized crime who worked to establish it by eliminating competiton.
The Wikipedia article does not flag Giuliani as being a member of Russian organized crime, but someone who Giuliani's law firm represents, an individual by the name of Dmytry Firtash.
Furthermore the timeline for this is over a decade after Giuliani was mayor of New York.
The link doesn't say that. The phrase you use is a reference in the Wikipedia article to the DOJ's characterization of Dmytry Firtash, "a Ukrainian oligarch who is prominent in the natural gas sector", not Giuliani.
Well, now you probably understand that Trump is not really anti-drug/anti-cartel. Nor do I think he's pro-drug/pro-cartel. I think he doesn't actually care except in how those issues affect his political career and public profile. Many of Trump's more ... let's call them "random" seeming statements and actions make much more sense if you look at them through the lens of "he doesn't actually care one way or the other".
Ulbricht's career represents many core values of a certain wing of today's Libertarians.
* unfettered and unregulated and anonymous weapons sales.
* willful ignorance and rejection of any of the social costs of buying and selling hard drugs.
* commerce that operates in a world that is difficult to be taxes by government entities, and ideally anonymously (even though bitcoin is the least anonymous thing in the world)
So are libertarians fighting for complete legalization of drugs? If so, why aren’t they pressing on Trump for that? Why wasn’t that an executive order vs pardoning this guy?
> I think it's a belief that a lot of us arrive at early in our lives, many eventually grow out of it.
Very astute. What’s interesting to me is the ability for youth to discount this potential change, mostly because they just see the end result vs the journey. I know I was like that.
> I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings.
I know this is probably as minority view, but I think if adults consent to buying and using any drug, that should be both fully legal, and their right and responsibility- any negative consequences are 100% their own fault, not the person who sold them. It's probably true that making drugs easier to buy made more people buy them, but I was only considering the ill effects of fraudulently adulterated products. Do the math differently if you don't see it this way.
I don't know how Silk Road was designed, and have never actually used it or anything like it- but I imagine it would be possible to eliminate fraudulent reviews with proper design, and they may have done so. eBay, for example, is almost free of fraudulent reviews because posting a single review is very expensive- you'd need to sell an item to yourself for full price, and then pay eBay their full (rather large) cut to post a single fraudulent review.
As a buyer, you should be able to take a single high effort review that contains something like mass spec chemical analysis results, and further confirm that the reviewer themselves has a credible history of making purchases and reviews broadly across a lot of different sellers. An impossibly expensive to fake signal. This could also be done automatically by the platform- by making the more credible reviews display first.
> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
Trump is not an idealist- he will promise anything to anyone if it gets power and attention. Previously, he had attempted a political career as a leftist, and switched to the right because it was getting more traction.
> I know this is probably as minority view, but I think if adults consent to buying and using any drug, that should be both fully legal, and their right and responsibility- any negative consequences are 100% their own fault, not the person who sold them. It's probably true that making drugs easier to buy made more people buy them, but I was only considering the ill effects of fraudulently adulterated products. Do the math differently if you don't see it this way.
I'd agree with you if the people that used these drugs did so rationally. That's not the case mostly though from what I've heard. Trauma is often the root cause and that's out of many people's control. From then on it's ub to society to help them.
If a high performing exec wants to buy drugs to function better, sure maybe that's ok but I doubt that's the majority of people.
I proclaimed nearly this exact opinion in the jury box after being summoned between 15 and 20 years ago. They didn't pick me for trial, which was the intended effect. I really did believe it at the time. Nowadays, I just think it's way more complicated and there are no simple or blanket answers.
Re-consenting: this is a different argument than saying more lives were saved because the reviews would remove adulterated products. Again, just look at opioid addiction for very clear evidence of the opposite effect.
It is very clear from what you’ve said that you haven’t used it :) I have browsed it when it was active and I was very pro tor. You’re making a lot of assumptions that simply don’t hold for silk road.
> Again, just look at opioid addiction for very clear evidence of the opposite effect.
I was playing devil's advocate, but agree there is more culpability to a seller if the drug overwhelms your ability to make the choice in the first place- however a lot of very illegal drugs do not do this. More so if you're using emotionally manipulative ads and selling methods as the alcohol and pharma industry do.
No doubt people were buying weed and hallucinogens on Silk Road, but there was A LOT of opioids, Xanax, cocaine, meth, and other highly addictive drugs that change people’s brain chemistry for the worse.
silk road was on the dark web, a place that is oriented 100% around anonymity. This precludes any sort of "elimination of fraudulent reviews" since there's no reasonable way to build any sort of chain of trust.
I explained several ideas to eliminate fraudulent reviews in my comment, that you didn't address. The main thing is to make a review coupled with a purchase that involves a large cut to the platform, so each review is very expensive. Secondly, don't take reviewers themselves seriously unless they've also made a large overall number of purchases to a diversity of sellers- making becoming a credible reviewer also expensive.
> Trump is not an idealist- he will promise anything to anyone if it gets power and attention. Previously, he had attempted a political career as a leftist, and switched to the right because it was getting more traction.
This is a critical point. His explicitly goal is to be an autocrat, there is no other ideology other than what works.
That's why I think the only real bit of him is the one that admires Putin. That is who he wants to be.
I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings. Given the anonymous nature handling bots spamming fake reviews would be even harder to catch here, and you ultimately don’t know who ended up addicted/hooked/DUI’s etc from the easy availability this provided. I’m not sure the total effects could ever be qualified, but it’s not like unadulterated drugs are automatically safe. Just look at how many lives pharma-grade opioids ruined, even though they were “safe”.
That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.
I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.