Two life sentences was a bit harsh. 11 years seems about right to me.
I suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.
But there were also abolitionists at the time, even amongst that class. Jefferson not being among them does, actually, diminish his standing and his views on justice. This quote, for example, does not acknowledge that there are also laws which are unjust to obey; such as the owning of human beings in chattel slavery.
I mean strictly speaking the people voted for Trump, so collectively they're all okay with this.
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
Is it unjust to prohibit the sale of illegal drugs, weapons, etc.? Society has good reasons for regulating certain goods. I regularly see people in my community who are enslaved by fentanyl and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The society I live in decided to make selling it illegal. What is unjust about that?
There are healthier middle grounds we could explore where e.g. advertisements are banned and individuals could register themselves as being banned from participating in certain addictive vices because they don't consistently have the willpower to quit or don't want to tempt fate trying it (and make it a crime to sell to an individual who has voluntarily banned themselves), but it's hard to argue that The War on Drugs has been in any way just.
I expect in such a society, certain groups (e.g. Mormons) would normalize banning yourself from vices the day you turn 18.
As I recall weapons weren't permitted on the platform.
The society didn't decide, the ruling class decided to use drug policy to attack their own citizens.
History shows that prohibition is an abject failure. The fent epidemic is symptomatic of this failed policy.
If they actually cared about the epidemic, addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin whilst also having ready access to treatment.
But then we'd have empty prisons and the police would be free to solve real crimes so we can't have that.
Is Trump pushing for broad drug decriminalisation? I feel like that would be necessary for this pardon to make sense on the basis of current drug laws being unjust.
Wasn't he also continuously complaining about how mexicans are importing all the drugs to the US (whether or not that statement is even factually correct)? He also recently designated drug cartels as terrorists. So all in all I wouldn't say he is for the decriminalisation of drugs.
Not exactly, fentanyl epidemic was specifically started by one family seek profit and ousted doctors to over prescribe it while claiming it was mildly addictive.
The war on drugs have caused immeasurable harm due to failure to understand most people use drugs either as escapism or as a tendency.
> addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin
We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist. We had readily available, doctor-prescribed, high quality narcotics available to anyone who wanted them and the result was an epic disaster that cost thousands of lives.
>We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist.
Not really, this was a case of a private company deliberately pushing narcotics for profit without oversight or any associated increase in access to treatment options.
Now the "opioid epidemic" has been replaced with a "fentanyl epidemic" which is objectively a much more dangerous drug with absolutely no regulation and murderous cartels instead of doctors - and we're still throwing people in prison for the crime of being addicts rather than treating it as a medical issue.
I don't know the stats (or if it's even possible to accurately collect statistics due to prohibition) but I'm fairly certain this costs more lives than the short lived opioid epidemic.
What is just is decided both by an individual and the society they exist in. "It is one's moral obligation to fight injustice" is a pretty common tenent to hold. Injustice can be city laws encouraging anti-homeless spikes. Injustice can also be genocide in a remote country. Those injustices get fought in very different ways. One can be handled by individual vigilanteeism and peacefully petitioning local governance. The other might require global war.
In my personal belief, everyone[0] has the right and moral obligation to fight the injustice they care about at the level they can manage. If that's handing out water at the protest or inventing penicillin, do what you personally can do to improve the world.
[0]the average layperson, obvious exceptions for power/money apply
Sure, but the facts matter. Making millions of dollars by operating a marketplace for illegal drugs is not even close to the same ballpark as protesting a draconian anti-homeless law, let alone resisting genocide!
The only reasonable argument for drug legalization, in my opinion, is the libertarian one - the idea that you should be free to take the drugs you want to take. I am sympathetic to this argument. I am someone who is able to make wise decisions about the drugs I take. But I also recognize that millions of my fellow citizens are not. The harm to society from drug addiction and overdoses outweighs the benefit to me getting high whenever I want.
Jefferson did, certainly. He was instrumental in starting a war from what I understand.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
> Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
Considering the diversity of standards of justice within the history of Christianity (which, in just the US, includes—relevant to this topic—MLK, sure, but also the Southern Baptist Convention, founded explicitly in support of slavery), I don't know that having rhetoric grounded in Christian theology tells much of substance about the standard of justice one is appealing to.
Touche, however there is plenty of evidence of people throughout history making this assertion, including MLK.
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
Maybe Thoreau? That's more authentic and gets at similar themes. On more than one level considering his circumstances and run-ins with law enforcement.
”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
The seven offenses in question: distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit money laundering
A judge bypassed the jury and prosecutor and sentenced him as if he hired hit men and admitted doing so. The sentence upgrade was based on a preponderance of evidence, whereas they would have had to proven beyond a reasonable doubt had he been charged.
Framing this as judicial activism is false. Many sentencing arrangements include - with the agreement of the defendant (since it is their rights in this case) - to have other related activities factored in exactly this manner.
It happens all the time in pleas and diversion agreements, so don’t frame it as a reckless lone judge going off the reservation.
do you know that is actually the case ? i've been trying to find the text of the pardon and haven't been able to yet. can only find Trump's description of it as "full and unconditional"
Given there are at least thousands if not millions of people who "provide online forums," and pretty much this single one is in prison, I have to wonder if there's something unique about this case?
I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?
Silk Road was, at its height, uniquely successful and making an absolute mockery of the United States government's capacity to regulate drug trafficking. In addition, he fashioned himself an anti-establishment persona, going by the handle "Dread Pirate Roberts" online.
He was unique in his magnitude of success. Governments can successfully magnify their enforcement ability by making an example of outliers.
There are multiple examples of federal law enforcement making examples of particularly brazen instances of flouting federal law that are disproportionate to the actual harm caused. Kevin Mitnick is a classic example.
Here's the thing about the US federal law enforcement: there aren't actually a lot of them. In a country of 380 million people, there are 38,000 agents. Google employs more people than the FBI. If the US citizenry decided to take collective action against them, the federal domestic police force alone could not stand against the citizenry.
This shapes where they apply their resources. To be most effective, they need to be visible so that people don't start to think of them as toothless, because mass-resistance to their general police activities would actually work. So they pursue cases into the dust to generate high-profile images of lawbreakers having a really awful time to discourage other lawbreakers.
He was prosecuted because he broke US drug law. But he was prosecuted to the extent he was prosecuted because Silk Road had made headlines as something untouchable by federal authority. That's the kind of Capone energy that the federal law enforcement cannot abide and survive as an institution.
Yes, it was the biggest drug market on the dark web at that time, and the 50,676 bitcoins seized by the feds from then is today worth 5,3 billion dollars to give you an idea.
Also there was a long side story with disappeared bitcoins, presumably stolen by federal investigators.
This was a pandering to get Libertarians' votes. It has nothing to do with the crime itself. I wouldn't commit any crimes and expect to get away with them unless I anticipated becoming the pawn in someone's scheme to get elected.
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society
It's odd because libertarian candidates usually only garner 1% to 3% of the votes. It does appear that there are a lot of libertarians that vote Republican because of the stigma third parties have, though. As someone who often votes for libertarian candidates, I can't understand it. Republicans are about as libertarian as a cheese sandwich.
I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.
I don't judge anyone too hard when they're willing to bend a bit to get someone out of jail after the key has been thrown away. I didn't vote Trump but I will admit the possibility of Ross being released made me pause when I marked my ballot, even his mom's image flashed in my mind and I felt guilty for not helping.
Of all the issues in this country that really has impact on millions of people, I am baffled when I hear people only caring about 1 person and not care about the common good of society and the hundreds of millions of people in the US who live in it. Fascinating and depressing.
Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
Very little about the Libertarian party is libertarian. Yet another party carrying water for authoritarianism, with the difference being that the implementation is through corporations.
Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
My point is that even if there were an electoral victory, the Libertarian Party would not bring individual freedom. They are operating from an assertion that starting with a list of moral axioms, every implication will be morally right by construction. By itself this is terribly mistaken (see Godel), but it goes askew even sooner when a few poor axioms are allowed to remain through "pragmatism", regulatory capture, etc.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
Don't be fooled by powerful people who claim to be libertarian, but are actually only interested in promoting freedom for themselves while denying the same to others.
Your second paragraph is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not the corporation xor the state. Fundamentally, corporations as we know them are creatures of the state - government chartered legal entities, running on the government's legal system, with government granted liability shields. But the main point is that where the nominal state disappears, the corporation(s) step into the power vacuum and become the inescapable government. To be able to take your business elsewhere or create your own competitor, you need individual rights. While the underlying physics supports this directly for some abilities, for others you need coordinated collective action. This often takes place through the state, meaning that blanket calls to dismantle parts of the current government can often serve as cover for enabling newer less-constrained government. Think yin-yang and NP/Turing completeness circular reductions, not towering software builds.
Speaking of jokes, it's always funny to us libertarians when we see government proponents talk about "freedom" being lost to the corporations under a libertarian system of (non) government.
The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.
They just won something they cared about: perhaps you should be taking them even more seriously than you did.
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
They got a single guy out of prison, but pretty much everything else in Trump's platform is diametrically opposed to libertarianism. It's hard to think of anything less libertarian than tariff-funded big government!
Tariffs are not good for free market diehards. However the nuance is that foreign countries like China do not operate on a fair playing field, they want free access to our markets but prevent our champions from entering their's. Something must be done here. I'm not convinced tariffs are the best tool, but at least it's something.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
He's said it a dozen different ways but as of yesterday it was 10% on China. Maybe tomorrow it will be 100%, it's not like the narrative is consistent apart from that there will be some level of tariffs.
> In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day.
Just to be clear, all they did is rename the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The Digital Service already existed; it hires tech workers from industry on short-term rotations to work on government projects. Now that thing that already existed is called DOGE, and it will continue to do nothing more than bring in industry engineers to make websites for the government. If there’s a “massive downsizing in the federal workforce,” it won’t be because of “DOGE.”
Winning by 1.6% is not a massive victory. It's actually a smaller margin than Hillary won the popular vote by in 2016 (despite losing the electoral vote).
Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support. The crypto and libertarian communities are obsessed with freeing Ulbricht. It was honestly a brilliant strategy, and probably the reason he won. Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.
Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
Authoritarianism is also popular with the democrats right now, but I don’t see how anything I said is name calling: I used terms with a specific meaning appropriate for the context- the only reason they have a negative connotation is because of what they actually mean. Do you know of other terms with the same meaning and more neutral connotations?
If you go by Trump's actions in his first term he was a pretty standard Republican, and mostly just cut taxes, with a lot of wild rhetoric which is part of his deal making shtick. In real terms I don't see Trump as uniquely authoritarian, probably less so than Biden, Obama and Bush. He seems to support free speech far more, which is the foundation for all other freedoms. He makes his money from the leisure industry, so his interests are aligned with Americans doing well and having disposable income. And he supports decentralization, so liberal states can adopt liberal policies, and so forth.
It seems people forget about the insane infringements of civil rights through the Patriot Act, NDAA, mass surveillance, lockdowns, firing people over vaccine mandates, etc. A poll showed about half of Democrats supported putting Americans into camps if they didn't take the vaccine, and a third supported seizing custody of their children. Democrats supported mass censorship and state control over media, which is far more authoritarian and fascist than anything the Republicans were doing.
I'll leave the authoritarianism aspect to someone else but I'll point out that the part of your comment where "he makes his money from the leisure industry, so his interests are aligned with Americans doing well and having disposable income" is not representative of his ability let alone judgement in planning/making decisions that reflect those interests. You can be in favor of something and completely botch the execution.
The PATRIOT Act was introduced by a Republican and signed into law by a Republican and had wide support from both parties. 62 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted against it in the House (there was only a single senate vote against it), and you can't have a discussion about the Patriot Act's introduction without bringing up the fact that it was enacted at the height of the post-9/11 fear. It has always been a controversial and flawed bill.
Most of today's social issues aren't about left versus right, they are about class.
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
True, much of that is because old people are the only ones still watching legacy media like cable news, which have repeatedly torched their credibility. Young people tend to get their news from podcasts and social media, which tends to not be as blatantly controlled.
Ask the swing voters. The republicans seized the narrative.
I bet you 100% of democratic voters could accurately describe the maga platform. The number who could describe the democratic platform would be far less.
That's because the Democrats are corrupt and have no platform beyond managed decline. We just had sickly king Theoden in office with a coven of Grima Wormtongues controlling the executive. Kamala Harris is an empty suit devoid of original thought, and quite obviously only selected for her identity. When asked how she would be any different, she said Biden was an old white man and she was not. She couldn't speak even in the most favorable venues like Oprah, and refused to go on Joe Rogan's podcast because she would have obviously imploded and humiliated herself.
It's stunning how far the Democrats have fallen. They've been completely co-opted by the PMC class and simply use identity politics to distract from their utter inability to deliver on anything. One need only look at the sad state of California, its massively delayed and over-budget high speed rail to nowhere, homelessness and decay, over-regulation inhibiting everything including the beloved green energy projects, etc. Texas literally has more green energy and cheaper electricity than California because they let people build, which can even be seen in their falling rents. Progressives can't allow that because it might 'change the character of a neighborhood', which is ironically one of the most conservative and anti-progress positions you could take.
It’s not ironic at all. The MAGA movement is really similar to how Mussolini came to power.
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
'Left-libertarianism' and 'classical liberalism' as a philosophy (not as a party affiliation) are arguably the dominant perspectives on HN. You've been on here for more than a year, you've been talking to them the entire time.
However, most of them wouldn't ever use the term libertarian, for not wanting to be associated with right wing libertarians.
There were a few articles on this in the media a day or two after the election that had lists in them, but I can't find them anymore because this new news overwhelmed the search terms I remember.
Many of the promises were directly conflicting, and/or upsetting to other groups that also had promises made to them. One example would be he promised some groups to push for the death penalty for anyone involved in selling drugs, in conflict with his pardon of Ulbricht here.
Wouldn't surprise me the slightest. Politicians' promises are weak signals to begin with, and we're talking about a politician here who's explicitly labeled as populist. I found a similar inability with search.
It's a trite thing to say, but when it comes to Trump it fits the pattern of inside dealing ... I'm guessing he personally will profit from this somehow / someone promised a donation / money.
If you meant Trump, it's not hidden, they released a Trump meme coin and the rug pull was after the inauguration timed with the release of the Melania meme coin, though entirely speculatively makes more sense for the investors to be foreign governments buying influence less obviously than the last Trump administration like Saudi Arabia hiring his son in law.
Crypto currency proponents benefit from the existence of dark net marketplaces because they are some of the main places for the non-speculative use of crypto currencies. I think Ross and his pardon represent a sort-of metaphor in crypto-currency proponents' eyes for the government's toleration of these dark net crypto marketplaces.
I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
What would give you a hint that attempted murder conviction would prevent his pardon? Trump pardoned over a thousand attempted murdered already this week.
The judge factored it into the sentencing, though. He likely did actually try to hire a contract killer - twice. In both cases he sincerely believed the murders were successfully committed, and he sent a lot of money to the assassins after being sent (doctored) "proof" of their killings.
I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.
I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
A judge and system who would give him 2 life sentences for this should not be trusted when he also factored in things which he wasn't charged and convicted of.
It is common that several outcomes are subject - with the defendants specific agreement - to be evaluated by a court on preponderance, not a jury. This was not judicial malpractice.
I am sorry but there's no way giving him more than 2 life sentences has any justification whatsoever. Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years. And the person who hired someone for hitman also only got 6 years. This is exactly the type of case where pardon makes 100% sense.
> Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years.
And Ross made millions from those people selling drugs on his site. Quite possibly more than any person selling drugs on his site.
And attempted to hire hitmen to prevent anyone stopping it. Not even as a potential "crime of passion", but solely to protect his money train.
And there's this whole false narrative of "youthful indiscretions". He didn't start building the site til he was 28 and was mostly running it in his early 30s.
Yes the FBI had root or admin access to the Silk Road system and could have very easily changed or otherwise affected logs/record IDs that the technical case rested on. Two of the FBI agents on the case were later punished for corruption on the case.
It was entrapment because federal agents posing as crime bosses were threatening Ross that if he didn't hire the hitman there would be serious consequences. He was manipulated and forced into the position he was in.
This is not necessarily true. In Burdick v. United States it does say "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it" but there is debate about whether it is binding of not.
Apparently, there is something in Lorance v. Commandant, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks that indicates that accepting a pardon does not imply guilt, but I am not very knowledge on that.
It was not entrapment. There is mention of undercover purchases and a controlled delivery by law enforcement, but these are not entrapment. Most of the evidence came from his own laptop.
The charge was dropped, but the court did hold a hearing on it when deciding on sentencing. They heard the evidence for and against and ruled by a preponderance of the evidence that he did in fact do it.
This. Evidence that isn't strong enough to criminally convict can be used for other purposes (e.g. sentencing, knowledge/intent, civil forfeiture, civil damages etc).
(see OJ Simpson paying money damages for a crime he was acquitted of)
Separate courts. He was indicted and tried for all the non-murder stuff in a New York federal court. He was indicted separately in a Maryland federal court on a murder-for-hire charge.
The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole. He appealed, and the Second Circuit upheld the sentence.
The prosecutors in Maryland then dropped the murder-for-hire charge because there was no point. They said this would allow them to direct their resources to other other cases where justice had not yet been served.
Though an article by CBS (transcript is an interview) has this:
“THE HUNT FOR DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS
In 2011 there was a new bad guy in cyberspace behind the website Silk Road. He oversaw more than $200 million in illegal transactions on the dark web, involving the sale of drugs, weapons and illicit services such as computer hacking. Even murders for hire were discussed on the site.”
“Milan Patel: We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, "hey, pay me two bitcoin, and I'll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband's email account." … and I suspect people were using it because it made a lot of sense. It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ross-ulbricht-dread-pirate-...
It stands to reason that given criminals buying and selling drugs online that the adjacent work of hacking or even murder for hire would be sought or facilitated given the fact that folks on the platform thought they were anonymous as they were transacting in bitcoin.
So someone should call the FBIs bluff and given this pardon either Ross himself or one of you — his fans — could go spin up a server and restart silk road. Trump’s basically saying it’s legal. As he’s got the power to enforce or not enforce the laws this pardon basically is saying start selling drugs online. Let your libertarian freak flag fly.
Fascinating. It is news to me that a federal court can consider the evidence for crimes not proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal sentencing. Learn something new every day.
Since he was sentenced federally, he'd be under the federal sentencing guidelines, but I imagine those are pretty harsh around the money laundering and drug trafficking (since they're tuned to provide a hammer to wield against mostly narco-enterprises). I suppose the additional preponderance of evidence gave the judge justification to push the sentence to the maximum allowed in the category?
It’s extremely common in for example diversion cases and others, where the defendant has to stipulate that they are agreeable to things being presented as in charging documents and evaluated based on preponderance by a court, not by a jury and not subject to principles of reasonable doubt.
Ironically, he was only pardoned for drug related crimes, so he could still be charged with murder related ones if they were not dropped with prejudice (i didn't look)
This is all AFAIK, they haven't released the text broadly yet, but his lawyers/etc say he was pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
Even what people call a 'full and unconditional' pardon is usually targeted at something specific, not like "a pardon for anything you may have ever done, anywhere, anytime' which people seem to think it means sometimes.
It's more of a legal term of art to describe pardons that erase convictions, restore rights, etc.
Rather than clemency which, say, commutes your sentence but leaves your conviction intact.
The judge wrote at sentencing the murder for hire 'counted' as an element of the criminal enterprise. So if he was pardoned for his crimes that includes the murder for hire per the judgement of his case.
So depending on the pardon text and interpretation, he may or may not be chargeable with this statute still federally.
I agree this has zero effect on charging him at the state level, and most states do not have statute of limitations on these types of crimes (or they are very long)
One issue with any potential trial for murder-for-hire is that the allegation as presented in the Maryland indictment has two problematic witnesses: DEA agent Carl Force who acted as the hitman, now in prison for embezzling cryptocurrency from the Silk Road case, and Curtis Green, the would-be victim in this case, who has previously insisted that Ulbricht was innocent of plotting his murder (and was also recently imprisoned for cocaine distribution last year, although I don't think that would be too relevant). Maybe the other allegations might have more meat on the bone, but they didn't make it on to any indictment.
Most recent pardons have been announced in documents labeled "Executive Grant of Clemency", so I don't think "clemency" and "pardons" are as distinct as you're saying.
And while I know you said "usually", I can't help but note that Hunter Biden was pardoned for any federal thing he may have done, anywhere, anytime in the last 10 years. Some of the last-minute pardons were pretty broad as well.
> so he could still be charged with murder related ones if they were not dropped with prejudice
They were dismissed with prejudice.
> “We are pleased that the prosecutors in the District of Maryland, after almost five years, have dismissed their indictment against Ross. Holding this over Ross’ head, without taking it to trial where he could defend himself, has been very damaging to Ross and his case, especially because it contained the only charge of murder-for-hire. Of course, this charge was never proven or convicted, but was very effective in smearing Ross’s reputation and hurting him in the legal process”.
> She said, “We had some good news recently. The indictment and superseding indictment against Ross in the District of Maryland were dismissed ‘with prejudice,’ meaning they can never be re-filed. This is especially good because those indictments contained the only charge ever made that Ross engaged in murder-for-hire. This was a serious allegation that Ross denies. It was never prosecuted or ruled on by a jury but was trumpeted by the government and the media as if it were proven fact”.
> Following his arrest in 2013, prosecutors also alleged that he planned murder-for-hire although, curiously, he was never charged or prosecuted for it at trial (and the allegations were dismissed with prejudice by a U.S. District Judge in 2018).
> The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice. Ross consistently denied the allegations (which relied on anonymous online chats never proven to have been authored by him) and those who know him never believed them. The only alleged victim ever identified, Curtis Green, is a fervent supporter of Ross’s clemency.
> The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole.
How is that not a massive violation of due process? Imagine you are at trial for something and get convicted. Then during the sentencing, some other unrelated case's evidence gets used by the Judge which was never introduced during trial and defendant never had any opportunity to defend or cross-examine. Judge uses that to sentence you to 2+ life sentences. After that, the other unrelated case gets dismissed WITH prejudice. Huh??? So the evidence which got used to sentence you was never ever cross-examined or tested in court. "preponderance of the evidence" is not what's used in criminal trials but just because it was introduced in sentencing, it's somehow okay?
Wonder if he can be charged with that now? Was there anything in the pardon related to this? AFAIK there is no time limit on bringing charges related to murder?
According to Wikipedia[1], he was convicted of charges related to hacking, narcotics, money laundering, and more.
But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.
So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.
Absolute no brainer, he should be celebrated. Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform. Of course if we had less draconian drug policy, it wouldn't be necessary but here we are.
As well as online drug marketplaces? Or would running one without legal trouble require a campaign-contribution booster pack?
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
I think most libertarians are against the war on drugs and would happily pardon or commute the sentences of non violent drug offenders, but the DPR probably takes priority for them because of the free trade issue compounded with the popularization of a non state-backed currency.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
If they are actually trying to maximize any kind of public welfare utility function, surely commutations and pardons and decriminalization and harm reduction for hundreds of thousands and millions of people, and body autonomy for hundreds of millions more should mean a wee bit more than this entirely transactional act.
> Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
No no no, he is right. Its safe because if you receive a bad batch of drugs you can leave a negative review on the page of the drug cartel that has your name and address, no chance of that having any repercussions for you at all.
even if its not perfect for every situation it was a lot better then what existed.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
The overwhelming majority of drug sales are for personal use. That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
>it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
> It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs. Most of them were likely "fell off the truck" samples from the original manufacturers being sold by people with an in on the supply, but no otherwise-easy access to an out on the demand.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
> Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs.
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
You shouldn't assume that all "street transfers" of drugs are peaceful or have a positive outcome for those involved. Harm reduction comes in many forms.
I'm pretty sure my comment says the exact opposite. I'm saying that SR was a massive operation that fueled street traffic, which in turn lacked any of the harm reduction virtues that SR is being assigned.
I'm pointing to the transaction layer. When you get thousands of dollars and product in a room with people you don't know things can get extremely unprofessional very quickly. It's really fun when you discover that most of the currency is counterfeit which happens more than you think.
What you say is also true. So there is a trade here. I'm not claiming it's "worth it," but the alternative without SR at all does seem to be more negative.
Yup. Drugs and the accompanying business disputes (there's a reason street dealers are armed or have armed people around) that would be normal in any other industry are sooo many people's (who would other wise not be violent criminals) entry point to violence. Letting parties remain at arms length yet transact successfully is such a huge step forward compared the prior status quo. Anything that gets buyers and sellers (either at the retail or distribution level) in illegal industries farther from each other is a win as far as I care.
I really wonder who benefits from this. Trump only does things that are good for him, or those close to him. I realize he's been making connections to the crypto world, and has his own meme coins. Does pardoning Ross somehow make crypto more valuable?
A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.
It’s also just good politics. There are a vocal group of voters that are in favor of this, so it gets those people on his side. And no reason not to (politically), as most people just don’t care about this topic, or if they do and disagree with the decision, this isn’t going to be the action that moves the needle for them on how they feel about Trump or the Republican Party.
Partisan caricature is not a reliable starting point for logical inference or deduction. To answer your question - on the campaign trail he attended a convention of libertarian organizers and promised them that if he won he would free Ross, and has followed through on that promise today.
> “All my Republican donations were dark,” [SBF] said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
I guess this is why he was upset about Mexico sending drug dealers and murderers - he didn't want competition for our homegrown drug dealers and murderers.
I would find this easier to celebrate if it was a commutation and not a pardon, or if it was a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke.
This is a rare Trump win. There are many things to criticize him for, but this pardon isn't one of them. I don't think anyone, after researching this case, would be okay with the life sentence handed down to Ross.
Most people in real life don’t even know who this guy is. This is a guy that online people know. I will agree it’s a win, he was unfairly sentenced. I just wish I would have been able to buy from SR. I did get to browse it before it was seized.
I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
> I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
Nothing wrong with HN in particular. Every polarising discussion on a platform with moderation or up/down voting system ends up this way. This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
> This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
Interesting -- what other system could you possibly have, other than votes...? I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. I guess traditional forum threads (sometimes with votes, a-la GitHub) are nice, but ultimately that's just trading "correct sounding" for "early commenter".
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
A more complicated system is too complicated, but if you could emoji react to a comment (from a very limited set of emoji), and then allow people to assign weights to each emoji, so someone who likes jokes could say :laughing-face: comments rank high up in the list but someone who was more dour could set their default view to be negative for them, then you'd have something a bit better than merely up or down. you could then set the default view to be heavily in favor of what you want the site's culture to be.
the four disagreements apply to a comment section as well: the comment is factually wrong, the comment lacks information, the comment. draws a different conclusion from the same set of information, or the comment is philosophically opposed to my viewpoint. For an online comment system, spam is another category.
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.
I'm not convinced that you looked at the article you linked.
> That’s because he was the Silk Road employee implicated in an elaborate, and fake, murder-for-hire scheme, created in part by a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.
>DPR contacted one of his trusted drug dealer contacts, Nob, and asked him to kill Green for $40,000. Shortly after, Nob sent DPR photos of Green covered in Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup and victim of an apparent asphyxiation, to prove the murder had been carried out.
> Unbeknown to DPR, Nob was no drug dealer. In fact, Nob was Carl Mark Force IV, the very same DEA agent who had arrested Green.
Both were fake. One was a con by the DEA and the other one a con by a single guy posing as executioner, victim and a slew of other colorful characters.
People are usually jailed for hiring contract killers, even if the contract killer happens to be a FBI informant and the murder does not end up getting done.
There wasn't any evidence that actually happened. It appears that it may have been fabricated by the same investigators that later robbed him of some millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Then when it went to trial the murder-for-hire charges were completely dropped due to lack of evidence.
He was convicted of:
1. Conspiracy to traffic narcotics
2. Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) (sometimes referred to as the “kingpin” charge)
3. Computer Hacking Conspiracy
4. Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identity Documents
5. Money Laundering Conspiracy
I think they were dropped because in 1 out of the 6 cases, the investigation was tainted because the associated government agents committed their own crimes, and also maybe but I can't prove it everyone thought that prosecuting someone who has been sentenced to 2 life sentences + 40 years is a waste of time.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
Hard disagree - Zuckerberg absolutely is responsible for inadequately policing calls for genocide on his platform. Just as every social network is responsible for policing child abuse materials. Should they be punished for such content being uploaded? Of course not. They should face punishment where their wilful failure to police such content results in active harm. Facebook's utterly irresponsible behaviour in Myanmar is a great example - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...
I didn’t say Zuck isn’t responsible for the ills of his platform. I said DPR is no more responsible than Zuck or Spiegel. That is, that there’s a distinction between facilitating a drug deal and dealing drugs, just as there is a distinction from managing a communication platform that promotes hate speech and violence.
That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
Doing business in, or running, a marketplace without established legal regulations opens you up to undefined consequences. Without laws to bind you, there are no laws to protect you.
You're right. Ross should have been granted a drug selling license, analogous to a liquor license, and it should have been revoked if he failed to check ID before allowing people to make purchases on his marketplace.
Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.
>Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.
And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.
I don’t think that’s true. Maybe in its infancy law really looks like that, but as societies grow their law books get more complex and can very easily become separated from majority perception of morality. Does morality explain zoning laws, or is it more about the equilibrium point of a pluralist conflict, everyone looking out for their interests, etc.
Roughly. But always read between the lines and follow the money. We didn't selectively ban Tiktok because government finally woke up to the dangers of social media.
Doctors can be arrested for malpractice. I sure do wish we could arrest some of these car makers for telling staff to skimp on details and taking "recalls" as a cost of doing business, but that's an issue for another time.
> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?
If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.
Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.
> It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out
Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?
Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.
For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.
People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:
1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.
2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).
Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.
An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.
On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.
The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.
This is why people only blame the DZOQBX brands that sell on Amazon for review fraud and not Amazon themselves, who are blamelessly hosting all those fraudulent sellers.
I think there is some difference between running a marketplace which you intend for people to sell products legally on, and a marketplace which you intend and know people will sell products illegally on.
Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.
Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.
Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.
I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.
If you knowingly operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold, you very much bear some responsibility of those injuries.
If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.
Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.
You can clearly see that "deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl)" didn't particularly alter or rise until after the 2013 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down of the Silk Road website and arrest of Ulbricht.
If the Silk Road Marketplace had any influence on fentanyl deaths Then some kind of spike would be expected during the years of operation, 2011-2013.
So I could bring down eBay by opening a store; selling something that I know (but eBay doesn't) is dangerous / broken / false. If that sale goes through, should eBay be taken down since they operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold ? eBay cannot reasonably test every single item that is sold through their platform. Same goes for every second hand marketplace in the world. They need to take some measure to address this, but cannot reduce the risk to 0.
As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.
Ebay tries to prevent you from selling illegal stuff though. Silk Road didn't. The reputation system was to prevent scams and bad quality products, not to prevent illegal transactions, right?
A large minority of the population (and in some cases, like weed, an overt majority) of the population don't think those transactions should be illegal. "The law is wrong" is sort of the whole point, and why Ulbricht is a quasi-folk hero.
This theory was actually tested last year and...eBay won.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.
There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.
In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.
DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.
Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.
It's a philosophical difference. As someone running a market where buyers and sellers meet I think it's valid to let the buyers and sellers participate in the exchange among themselves at their own risk. The person running the market doesn't need to treat the participants like children. Plus, if you're on the TOR network and buying obscure research chems using crypto in the early 2010s I think it's safe to assume you're more sophisticated and aware of what you're getting into than the average person.
Smart people can differentiate between a transparent marketplace which provides a net economic benefit to society from an obfuscated one which by design enables illicit activity.
Idk about silk road, but hydra (russian online marketplace) was the best thing that happened to russia drug market. It had very good reputation system and even labs that did random testing of drugs being sold
Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs
I don't think those types of hypotheticals are taken very seriously in court rooms. One, they are effectively unfalsifiable, because it's a about harm that could have happened but didn't. Two, they can be applied universally. Any action might have prevented a catastrophe, after all. Courts persecute based on laws broken and harm done.
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
drugs is one part, but silkroad facilitated more than drug, guns, fake documents, stolen data, money laundering, fake currency, contract killers... the list goes on.
Are you confusing SR with other darknet markets? SR explicitly banned most of these things (guns, fake currency, stolen data, contract killers). Yes, fake documents were allowed.
The government should have investigated the people that listed and sourced the drugs
this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately
but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was
So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.
Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.
You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.
Real justice would be changing the laws and sentencing guidance (through a democratically legitimate process), and re-evaluating the sentences of everyone affected.
Whatever you think about the outcome in this case, it is the moral equivalent of vigilante justice. It is unfair to others convicted under the same regime, who don't happen to be libertarian icons who can be freed in exchange for a few grubby votes.
He has admitted his wrong doings and made efforts to change whilst in prison. I doubt he will go straight back to a life even remotely close to before. He was doing good in prison for other inmates and I imagine he will continue doing the same now he has this second chance.
What the future holds for someone who was pardoned is likely decided based on very different rationalization compared to how one acts while serving a lifetime prison sentence.
Whilst I understand your point of view that the change in circumstances can change how someone decides to act, I don't believe there is much history to show someone who gained a surprising second chance outside of prison has gone back to their previous life.
I'm wondering that too. I think there's three options: he either has secret money hidden away, is going to get a cushy job in tech by some fan, or he's going to be working as a walmart greeter in 3 years.
Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol
This conversation is presently flagged. Why? When Ross was sentenced HN had a discussion about it with more than 600 comments. His conviction has been discussed numerous additional times in other threads throughout the years. His pardon is plainly on-topic for HN, and this discussion is a necessary followup to those previous discussions.
Of course it's on topic. Why did users flag it? Probably some combination of not liking the event itself and fatigue with political stories. But that's just a guess.
In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.
It is much more on-topic than the Musk thing. HN has been debating this conviction, in intricate detail, since 2015. Meanwhile, you can just go to any news site from CNN to Fox to the Guardian to see the Musk thing. There's stuff to talk about with the Ulbricht story, and basically nothing to talk about with the Musk thing, except for subsets of both sides who are just itching to have a flamewar about it.
The Ulbricht story is also in the news. I don't see that there's a ton to say about it that hasn't come up in the previous (exhaustive) discussions that you mention. The people who thought Ulbricht was prosecuted unjustly are happy and the people who didn't are less happy (unless they thought the sentence was too harsh). I suspect that we just disagree about the significance of the Musk story.
The problem with the Musk story isn't simply that it's a news story; it's that it's only a news story. It's important to understand that this isn't a question of the significance of either story. Important things happen around the world every day that aren't good subjects for HN threads.
I don’t agree that the Ulbricht story is more than just a news story, but in any case, my issue is not with that story being unflagged.
HN is, as you know, chock full of enormous unflagged threads about news stories involving Elon Musk that amount to little more than “Elon Musk says something on Twitter!” It may well be that the mods would happily flag all these submissions into oblivion if they had the time. But I don’t think it’s a good look to have all of this trivial discussion about Musk on the site and then defer to the submission guidelines (reasonable enough in themselves, but lightly enforced in Musk’s case) now that he is in a position of power within the US government.
This isn’t about individual moderation decisions necessarily being wrong or unjustifiable in isolation (though I do think the 'but it might cause a flamewar!' excuse is applied with wild inconsistency). The issue is that avoiding political flamewars on a tech news site in 2025 is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2010.
All of those "Elon Musk says something on Twitter" threads are worth flagging. They're insubstantial, and I can't be the only one here who would like a lot less of that guy in his life.
I'll spare you the detailed argument for why Ulbricht is clearly not "just" a news story.
Most libertarians considered the Silk Road a place to buy psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms or experimental synthetic drugs (not that these don’t come with numerous risks). Not a bulk heroin warehouse. So the perception is different from that of a wholesale fentanyl clearing house.
A possible line of reasoning is that drugs should be legal, but the property and violent crimes committed around them shouldn't be, in the same way that adults are legally permitted to drink alcohol, but they're not legally permitted to drive drunk. The "ruining cities" is about the crimes, not the drugs themselves.
That's the logically consistent line of thought, yes. Which is one I don't particularly disagree with, because of the harm the war on drugs has caused.
But the inconsistency comes from people advocating for a black market drug site and bending towards the far right. The same people who in the same breath also further criminalize drugs, reduce access to things that help addicts while arguing that drug dealers should be deported and our streets swept.
The logical inconsistency is that 'their' drug dealers are conducted by people of virtue therefore they did nothing to break the law. And not being willing to deal with the actual fallout of said illegal drug empire.
Political coalitions are not personifiable, contiguous entities. There are disparate groups of individuals aligned on certain issues and at each other's throats elsewhere. That said, political hypocrisy isn't uncommon, but in this case you may be over-generalizing.
Just because the far right complains about 'drugged out zombies' ruining cities thanks to drug smugglers from Mexico, doesn't mean libertarians think that. Libertarians have been opposed to the "war on drugs" for decades.
Well even if he bet on going that route he wouldn't have to be "elected", and my last line applies none the less, it didn't hurt him during an actual election.
Yes. Except, "neutralize?" I don't know why the federal government would bother with the pretense of a 22nd Amendment when they demonstrably do not care in the slightest about the 14th or most of the Bill of Rights.
He promised international canvassers that we'd have peace in Ukraine on his first day in office. Whatever he arranged with druggie libertarians is chopped liver from a policy perspective. On the international stage it's the dictionary definition of a nothingburger.
as somebody with family members who are "republicans in idaho" they mostly won’t care. many if not most republican idahoans think you should be able to own machine guns and do whatever you want without hurting others.
the mormon ones would be the most likely that would object, but even plenty of the republican/libertarian mormons i know are happy to have the massive government overreach corrected.
Trump promised to do this at the Libertarian Party convention. This case is very important to the libertarian crowd. He is a martyr for many of their ideals. After Trump was so well received at the convention the LP, recently taken over by the right faction of the party, put forth a candidate specifically chosen to not get votes so that members would vote for Trump. Trump seems to be a man of his word.
It seems like the voters that were being referred to value restoring rights. How can something immediately achievable be balanced with "the economy", a thing so broad and deeply systemic?
It isn't clear from your original statement that those voters aren't from Pennsylvania. I interpret your statement as discounting the weight of their vote on actions they care about. There are many perspectives, and the values of those who did vote in that direction are being addressed in some way.
We're talking about Libertarians and not Republicans, atleast that is what the parent comment was referring to. I don't know what Republicans what or believe vs what they say. The action to pardon directly addresses the Libertarian ideals.
wow, not even god could eliminate sin but apparently the republicans can?
how do you envision that being enforced? death penalty for any sin? You've never made a sin yourself? If so how could you live in sin-free city? sounds sick and dystopian.
anyway, the point i wanted to make was that when you vote for somebody, you are the one giving that person the authority to take actions on your behalf. if you voted for T, you shouldn't complain about anything he does, because he can only do so because of your vote. learn to be wary of politicians, they treat you right during the dates (election) but after the wedding the true person comes out.
The people in Pennsylvania knew they were voting for an out-of-control, unpredictable, felonious septuagenarian with fascist tendencies. Complaining now that he is all of those things before he is someone who may or may not do other good things, is just silly. Either they knew, or they've been had.
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
Congress is involved. They have to prove they can govern. It's hard to be the party of "law and order" if you need only to kiss the ring for your release.
October of 2001 they were up to 80% approval. Left to their own devices by Aug 2002 they were below 50%.
There's an argument to be made that congress doesn't really represent the people at large. Some people go on to make the argument that through gerrymandering politicians choose who's elected, and not the people.
You may not like Trump but I remember he fulfilled or attempted to fulfill a lot of his campaign promises back in 2016 as well. Biden, the career politician, talked a lot about many things before election and then forgot about them after he was elected. For example, universal health care. Obama promised to enshrine a woman's right to abortion as law, and then when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me." Then we lost Roe V Wade.
Trump did just about what every president does - makes promises and then does some of them, tries to some others (successful unless thwarted by Congress), and ignores others.
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate (to overcome the filibuster, also not as many Dems congressmen supported it as you might think). Neither did Clinton (people thought it would happen then)
Let's go through Trump's campaign promises: Infrastructure, Border wall, increased US manufacturing, repealing ACA, "drain the swamp". He achieved zero of those.
Biden in contrast followed up on his campaign promises: Infrastructure, increased US manufacturing, expanding ACA plus lowering costs. Among others.
That's a really low bar with that bit added. "I didn't say it would be easy" was his line about his token tariffs the first term ... then he never tried again for the rest of that term.
Biden delivered on the IRA and climate change bill.
Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and filled it instead. I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled - he didn't even build the wall (probably his main promise).
I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled
Renegotiate NAFTA
Lower Taxes
Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Nominate to the Supreme Court from the list he shared
Kill TPP
No Social Security Cuts
Take No Salary
Where he failed, it generally wasn't for trying, but because he was getting blocked by Congress, the courts, and the general bureaucracy. You only have to look at the last 48 hours to see a better prepared Trump committed to his promises.
I'm not sure "No Social Security Cuts" should count, because (1) he did try to cut it in his proposed 2020 budget, (2) he did nothing to try to address the shortfall that is expected in the social security trust fund around 2033, and (3) he said that if he was reelected in 2020 he would get rid of the payroll tax, which would have moved the depletion of the trust fund up to around 2026.
This is 100% true. I am posting from an anon account (obviously), but I was heavily involved in this. I worked with members of the party to push part of their strategy - mainly the coalition with trump and an effort to get vivek and elon involved. We spoke about this in 2023. I didn't care about Ross, had my own motivations, but I wrote some of their playback with AI and it worked. I didn't know about certain things (like the losing candidate for example). I wrote strategy that seems to have made its way all the way to Trump's team.
The LP candidate was nominated due to some fluke/shenanigans/dealings between candidates. Based on the right-leaning demographics you would not expect him to win. It just happened to work out perfectly to get the people who would never vote for him anyway to vote for Trump. (Meanwhile the chairwoman encouraged Biden supporters to vote for the LP candidate).
Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.
The clips of him rolling his eyes and head around in boredom at the inauguration definitely looked like he was suffering from some kind of withdrawal symptoms.
Whether or not he was the sole or even primary reason, he knew about it beforehand as seen by his tweet last night saying it was coming soon. Love him or hate him, it's a bit concerning that he has that level of access IMO.
What do you mean? Trump just pardoned or commuted pretty much all of the J6 crowd. One guy convicted of crimes that don't require proving violence beyond a reasonable doubt is pretty tame in comparison. He is one of thousands.
Trump know the Jan 6 rioters and supported them. Pardoning is important to justify his claim that nobody did anything wrong as that the election was "stolen by the Dems".
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
It might be visible. Just not a large amount from one account to another. Thats not how laundering works and definitely not how trades work that are supposed to go unnoticed.
They seem to be pandering to the more libertarian tech community. This guy appeals to that and to the more radical maga types who want a revolution. I’m sure we’ll see more.
The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
> The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
I'd argue promoting that narrative was ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
Do you think it's possible the 11 years he spent in prison could have had any rehabilitation effect? Or should we jail anyone who ever commits a crime to a life sentence?
Whether Ulbricht is a changed man is somewhat immaterial to the signaling to other young would-be drug kingpins that the President thinks you shouldn't be punished so harshly for setting up online black markets.
I agree: online black markets should be free trade. If drugs were legalized, even fewer issues would exist, and it would be easier to isolate the actual crime which imposes negative, third party externalities like traffiking or violence.
B) I don’t see this sort of leniency being offered to other drug dealers, in fact, the Trump administration wants to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
C) a day 1 pardon communicates that it’s a top priority of the administration that drug dealers and cop killers (Jan 6) get freed.
D) he was convicted by a jury of his peers who know full well what a judge would sentence him to. Now Trump comes out to overrule that.
The time to change sentencing would have been pre-trial. We tried doing that, but that was a massive loser electorally.
E) it wasn't merely commutation, it was a pardon. A pardon means that President is declaring the defendant not guilty. A commutation merely reduces the sentence.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 450 ms ] threadI suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.
Murder has never been legal.
Don't take my word for it though, the monticello folks looked into it too - https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
It is a fun quote though, because it's one of those quotes that people want to use to justify their own dumb behavior.
"If you don't like the law, feel free to ignore it" - Albert Einstein
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
I expect in such a society, certain groups (e.g. Mormons) would normalize banning yourself from vices the day you turn 18.
The society didn't decide, the ruling class decided to use drug policy to attack their own citizens.
History shows that prohibition is an abject failure. The fent epidemic is symptomatic of this failed policy.
If they actually cared about the epidemic, addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin whilst also having ready access to treatment.
But then we'd have empty prisons and the police would be free to solve real crimes so we can't have that.
Last I heard he was promising to make drug dealers eligible for the death penalty: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-wants-e...
The war on drugs have caused immeasurable harm due to failure to understand most people use drugs either as escapism or as a tendency.
That's why it has failed.
How are cartels terrorist organizations?
We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist. We had readily available, doctor-prescribed, high quality narcotics available to anyone who wanted them and the result was an epic disaster that cost thousands of lives.
> weapons weren't permitted on the platform
My mistake.
Not really, this was a case of a private company deliberately pushing narcotics for profit without oversight or any associated increase in access to treatment options.
Now the "opioid epidemic" has been replaced with a "fentanyl epidemic" which is objectively a much more dangerous drug with absolutely no regulation and murderous cartels instead of doctors - and we're still throwing people in prison for the crime of being addicts rather than treating it as a medical issue.
I don't know the stats (or if it's even possible to accurately collect statistics due to prohibition) but I'm fairly certain this costs more lives than the short lived opioid epidemic.
In my personal belief, everyone[0] has the right and moral obligation to fight the injustice they care about at the level they can manage. If that's handing out water at the protest or inventing penicillin, do what you personally can do to improve the world.
[0]the average layperson, obvious exceptions for power/money apply
The only reasonable argument for drug legalization, in my opinion, is the libertarian one - the idea that you should be free to take the drugs you want to take. I am sympathetic to this argument. I am someone who is able to make wise decisions about the drugs I take. But I also recognize that millions of my fellow citizens are not. The harm to society from drug addiction and overdoses outweighs the benefit to me getting high whenever I want.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
2. There is no evidence anyone else ever said this, either
The closest you get is MLK.
See https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
>Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
Considering the diversity of standards of justice within the history of Christianity (which, in just the US, includes—relevant to this topic—MLK, sure, but also the Southern Baptist Convention, founded explicitly in support of slavery), I don't know that having rhetoric grounded in Christian theology tells much of substance about the standard of justice one is appealing to.
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
the real criminals for that prank were never even tried.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w...
It happens all the time in pleas and diversion agreements, so don’t frame it as a reckless lone judge going off the reservation.
edit: i see your other comment with the context
It should eventually pop up here: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-recipients
(among other places)
He was not pardoned for any crimes not charged, and therefore could still be charged.
I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?
He was unique in his magnitude of success. Governments can successfully magnify their enforcement ability by making an example of outliers.
I find that hard to believe.
Inconceivable!
Here's the thing about the US federal law enforcement: there aren't actually a lot of them. In a country of 380 million people, there are 38,000 agents. Google employs more people than the FBI. If the US citizenry decided to take collective action against them, the federal domestic police force alone could not stand against the citizenry.
This shapes where they apply their resources. To be most effective, they need to be visible so that people don't start to think of them as toothless, because mass-resistance to their general police activities would actually work. So they pursue cases into the dust to generate high-profile images of lawbreakers having a really awful time to discourage other lawbreakers.
He was prosecuted because he broke US drug law. But he was prosecuted to the extent he was prosecuted because Silk Road had made headlines as something untouchable by federal authority. That's the kind of Capone energy that the federal law enforcement cannot abide and survive as an institution.
Theres probably a movie or two about it too
It's weird that GP seemed to purposely obscure that.
Also there was a long side story with disappeared bitcoins, presumably stolen by federal investigators.
Biden pardonning his son and other criminals also made this clear.
Most people are becoming aware most politicians are actually criminals in suits.
* In May 2024, candidate Donald Trump said that if re-elected President, he would commute Ulbricht's sentence on his first day in office
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
Your second paragraph is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not the corporation xor the state. Fundamentally, corporations as we know them are creatures of the state - government chartered legal entities, running on the government's legal system, with government granted liability shields. But the main point is that where the nominal state disappears, the corporation(s) step into the power vacuum and become the inescapable government. To be able to take your business elsewhere or create your own competitor, you need individual rights. While the underlying physics supports this directly for some abilities, for others you need coordinated collective action. This often takes place through the state, meaning that blanket calls to dismantle parts of the current government can often serve as cover for enabling newer less-constrained government. Think yin-yang and NP/Turing completeness circular reductions, not towering software builds.
The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
Wasn't it 60% for China, 25% for Canada and Mexico and 10% for the rest of the planet?
Wait, what?
Just to be clear, all they did is rename the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The Digital Service already existed; it hires tech workers from industry on short-term rotations to work on government projects. Now that thing that already existed is called DOGE, and it will continue to do nothing more than bring in industry engineers to make websites for the government. If there’s a “massive downsizing in the federal workforce,” it won’t be because of “DOGE.”
so what? Coalition-building is common in the rest of the democratic world. This is, in my view, a similar thing.
I believe around 230,000 votes across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin would have made the difference.
I think that counts as eking, personally.
Ironic? It's the oldest trick in the book bro
Or, you know... people who think it's a dick move to call an entire political movement pedophiles without a shred of evidence.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
It seems people forget about the insane infringements of civil rights through the Patriot Act, NDAA, mass surveillance, lockdowns, firing people over vaccine mandates, etc. A poll showed about half of Democrats supported putting Americans into camps if they didn't take the vaccine, and a third supported seizing custody of their children. Democrats supported mass censorship and state control over media, which is far more authoritarian and fascist than anything the Republicans were doing.
The PATRIOT Act was introduced by a Republican and signed into law by a Republican and had wide support from both parties. 62 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted against it in the House (there was only a single senate vote against it), and you can't have a discussion about the Patriot Act's introduction without bringing up the fact that it was enacted at the height of the post-9/11 fear. It has always been a controversial and flawed bill.
Most of today's social issues aren't about left versus right, they are about class.
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
This is a bad joke.
The only place I've seen anything about "transgender issues" is from the Republicans saying that that is the only thing Democrats are running on.
I bet you 100% of democratic voters could accurately describe the maga platform. The number who could describe the democratic platform would be far less.
It's stunning how far the Democrats have fallen. They've been completely co-opted by the PMC class and simply use identity politics to distract from their utter inability to deliver on anything. One need only look at the sad state of California, its massively delayed and over-budget high speed rail to nowhere, homelessness and decay, over-regulation inhibiting everything including the beloved green energy projects, etc. Texas literally has more green energy and cheaper electricity than California because they let people build, which can even be seen in their falling rents. Progressives can't allow that because it might 'change the character of a neighborhood', which is ironically one of the most conservative and anti-progress positions you could take.
I think the Ukraine stuff is more complicated than you're making it out.
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
Should just move to Belarus and you can have that today.
However, most of them wouldn't ever use the term libertarian, for not wanting to be associated with right wing libertarians.
Very interesting insight, thank you for sharing it. Do you happen to know other examples as well?
Many of the promises were directly conflicting, and/or upsetting to other groups that also had promises made to them. One example would be he promised some groups to push for the death penalty for anyone involved in selling drugs, in conflict with his pardon of Ulbricht here.
I also suspect Ulbricht quite likely has keys for wallets the FBI didn't find out about (and it's corrupt agents didn't steal).
I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
The case was dropped after NY conviction since he was sentencing to life, so there was little point in continuing.
Clearly that was a mistake if a lack of an attempted murder conviction helped him get a pardon.
I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.
I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
I feel like me might disagree on Ulbricht, but overall mandatory maximums make a lot of sense.
Ps. El Chapo got shorter sentence than Ross.
They both had greater-than-life sentences, which in practice is the same thing.
And Ross made millions from those people selling drugs on his site. Quite possibly more than any person selling drugs on his site.
And attempted to hire hitmen to prevent anyone stopping it. Not even as a potential "crime of passion", but solely to protect his money train.
And there's this whole false narrative of "youthful indiscretions". He didn't start building the site til he was 28 and was mostly running it in his early 30s.
> "I need his real-world identity, so I can threaten him with violence," DPR told RealLucyDrop.
> "I don't know how I feel about that solution," said RealLucyDrop
Surely that can't be entrapment.
"Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real"
https://www.wired.com/story/silk-road-variety-jones-sentenci...
Apparently, there is something in Lorance v. Commandant, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks that indicates that accepting a pardon does not imply guilt, but I am not very knowledge on that.
(see OJ Simpson paying money damages for a crime he was acquitted of)
The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole. He appealed, and the Second Circuit upheld the sentence.
The prosecutors in Maryland then dropped the murder-for-hire charge because there was no point. They said this would allow them to direct their resources to other other cases where justice had not yet been served.
I support your right to disagree with the pardon. But please don't recklessly post disinformation like that.
I had always thought it was the 4chan of marketplaces. https://www.gawkerarchives.com/the-underground-website-where...
Though an article by CBS (transcript is an interview) has this:
“THE HUNT FOR DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS
In 2011 there was a new bad guy in cyberspace behind the website Silk Road. He oversaw more than $200 million in illegal transactions on the dark web, involving the sale of drugs, weapons and illicit services such as computer hacking. Even murders for hire were discussed on the site.”
“Milan Patel: We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, "hey, pay me two bitcoin, and I'll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband's email account." … and I suspect people were using it because it made a lot of sense. It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.” https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ross-ulbricht-dread-pirate-...
It stands to reason that given criminals buying and selling drugs online that the adjacent work of hacking or even murder for hire would be sought or facilitated given the fact that folks on the platform thought they were anonymous as they were transacting in bitcoin.
So someone should call the FBIs bluff and given this pardon either Ross himself or one of you — his fans — could go spin up a server and restart silk road. Trump’s basically saying it’s legal. As he’s got the power to enforce or not enforce the laws this pardon basically is saying start selling drugs online. Let your libertarian freak flag fly.
Since he was sentenced federally, he'd be under the federal sentencing guidelines, but I imagine those are pretty harsh around the money laundering and drug trafficking (since they're tuned to provide a hammer to wield against mostly narco-enterprises). I suppose the additional preponderance of evidence gave the judge justification to push the sentence to the maximum allowed in the category?
This is all AFAIK, they haven't released the text broadly yet, but his lawyers/etc say he was pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
Even what people call a 'full and unconditional' pardon is usually targeted at something specific, not like "a pardon for anything you may have ever done, anywhere, anytime' which people seem to think it means sometimes.
It's more of a legal term of art to describe pardons that erase convictions, restore rights, etc.
Rather than clemency which, say, commutes your sentence but leaves your conviction intact.
The only thing it would protect him against would be the federal murder for hire statute (18 USC 1958).
I doubt the pardon will be considered to cover that, but we'll have to wait to see the text.
There is nothing here that would prevent him from being charged with murder for hire, or even other drug crimes.
He was only pardoned as to his existing convictions.
However, murder for hire is also federal crime - see 18 USC 1958 and the DOJ CRM on this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
So depending on the pardon text and interpretation, he may or may not be chargeable with this statute still federally.
I agree this has zero effect on charging him at the state level, and most states do not have statute of limitations on these types of crimes (or they are very long)
Most recent pardons have been announced in documents labeled "Executive Grant of Clemency", so I don't think "clemency" and "pardons" are as distinct as you're saying.
And while I know you said "usually", I can't help but note that Hunter Biden was pardoned for any federal thing he may have done, anywhere, anytime in the last 10 years. Some of the last-minute pardons were pretty broad as well.
You can see, this was simply a pardon for his existing convictions, no uncharged crimes, not even things related to these crimes.
As a result, he could still be charged with anything they chose not to charge.
As such, your nitpicking was pointless.
They were dismissed with prejudice.
> “We are pleased that the prosecutors in the District of Maryland, after almost five years, have dismissed their indictment against Ross. Holding this over Ross’ head, without taking it to trial where he could defend himself, has been very damaging to Ross and his case, especially because it contained the only charge of murder-for-hire. Of course, this charge was never proven or convicted, but was very effective in smearing Ross’s reputation and hurting him in the legal process”.
> She said, “We had some good news recently. The indictment and superseding indictment against Ross in the District of Maryland were dismissed ‘with prejudice,’ meaning they can never be re-filed. This is especially good because those indictments contained the only charge ever made that Ross engaged in murder-for-hire. This was a serious allegation that Ross denies. It was never prosecuted or ruled on by a jury but was trumpeted by the government and the media as if it were proven fact”.
https://perspectivesmatter.com/2018/08/silk-road-drugs-the-i...
https://www.humanrightsdefensecenter.org/action/news/2020/dy...
> Following his arrest in 2013, prosecutors also alleged that he planned murder-for-hire although, curiously, he was never charged or prosecuted for it at trial (and the allegations were dismissed with prejudice by a U.S. District Judge in 2018).
> The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice. Ross consistently denied the allegations (which relied on anonymous online chats never proven to have been authored by him) and those who know him never believed them. The only alleged victim ever identified, Curtis Green, is a fervent supporter of Ross’s clemency.
https://freeross.org
Lucky him, as his pardon doesn't cover them. But he could still be charged at the state level, and at the federal level with any other crime.
How is that not a massive violation of due process? Imagine you are at trial for something and get convicted. Then during the sentencing, some other unrelated case's evidence gets used by the Judge which was never introduced during trial and defendant never had any opportunity to defend or cross-examine. Judge uses that to sentence you to 2+ life sentences. After that, the other unrelated case gets dismissed WITH prejudice. Huh??? So the evidence which got used to sentence you was never ever cross-examined or tested in court. "preponderance of the evidence" is not what's used in criminal trials but just because it was introduced in sentencing, it's somehow okay?
But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.
So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
Would you call this amnesty? He was already in jail for a decade, I thought.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
Not that it matters, as it was an illustrative example.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
What you say is also true. So there is a trade here. I'm not claiming it's "worth it," but the alternative without SR at all does seem to be more negative.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY
In 2021, presumably during SBF's (big Democrat donor) FTX scam, Trump thought that Bitcoin was a scam:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734
Now he is best friends with the "crypto", AI, and H1B bros.
> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...
Trump doesn't have the power to unilaterally change laws (fortunately!)
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
the four disagreements apply to a comment section as well: the comment is factually wrong, the comment lacks information, the comment. draws a different conclusion from the same set of information, or the comment is philosophically opposed to my viewpoint. For an online comment system, spam is another category.
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-...
> That’s because he was the Silk Road employee implicated in an elaborate, and fake, murder-for-hire scheme, created in part by a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.
>DPR contacted one of his trusted drug dealer contacts, Nob, and asked him to kill Green for $40,000. Shortly after, Nob sent DPR photos of Green covered in Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup and victim of an apparent asphyxiation, to prove the murder had been carried out.
> Unbeknown to DPR, Nob was no drug dealer. In fact, Nob was Carl Mark Force IV, the very same DEA agent who had arrested Green.
The trial for the real one was scrapped because of his other convictions.
The man just didn’t die because the killer was a DEA agent in reality.
That’s still a felony.
He was convicted of:
In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...
He also directly attempted to have someone murdered, which is a very serious crime in any country. The guy is not a hero. - https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...
That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.
Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.
Next up - THOUGHTPOLICING!
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
These are not comparable institutions.
It's almost as if the state was a highly immoral construct.
Read Hoppe.
GP misremembered what the 500 casualties number refers to (see article).
You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.
Also alcohol = drug = substance = molecule. IT all depends on how you morally frame it.
There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.
And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.
> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?
Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.
Drug producers want pure products. It's almost entirely middlemen who cut drugs with whatever random chemicals they have on hand.
Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?
Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.
For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.
2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).
Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.
On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.
The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.
Ross willingly sold weapons, body parts, etc on it. He personally ok'ed the sale of these things (text proof from the prosecution)
Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.
Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.
Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.
I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.
If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.
Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.
This seems unlikely given he's been imprisoned for eleven years.
See: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
You can clearly see that "deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl)" didn't particularly alter or rise until after the 2013 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down of the Silk Road website and arrest of Ulbricht.
If the Silk Road Marketplace had any influence on fentanyl deaths Then some kind of spike would be expected during the years of operation, 2011-2013.
As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.
There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.
In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.
DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.
Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.
He wasnt some hands off executive who had no idea. Smart people should be able to not equate an illegal market place with a legal market place
Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs
more or less than those who bought drugs from street dealers?
could it not be possible the silk road saved the lives of many more teenagers who would have died from street drugs otherwise?
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately
but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was
So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.
Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.
You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.
Whatever you think about the outcome in this case, it is the moral equivalent of vigilante justice. It is unfair to others convicted under the same regime, who don't happen to be libertarian icons who can be freed in exchange for a few grubby votes.
Starting a business that accepts crypto payments is going to be a tell.
Didnt have to look far, from dec 9:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/exonerated-man-heading-back-to...
Now it's all about podcasts, energy drinks and crypto coin rug-pulls.
Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol
In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.
HN is, as you know, chock full of enormous unflagged threads about news stories involving Elon Musk that amount to little more than “Elon Musk says something on Twitter!” It may well be that the mods would happily flag all these submissions into oblivion if they had the time. But I don’t think it’s a good look to have all of this trivial discussion about Musk on the site and then defer to the submission guidelines (reasonable enough in themselves, but lightly enforced in Musk’s case) now that he is in a position of power within the US government.
This isn’t about individual moderation decisions necessarily being wrong or unjustifiable in isolation (though I do think the 'but it might cause a flamewar!' excuse is applied with wild inconsistency). The issue is that avoiding political flamewars on a tech news site in 2025 is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2010.
I'll spare you the detailed argument for why Ulbricht is clearly not "just" a news story.
People have a soft spot for enterprising wunderkinds of certain demographics, even if he wasn't actually a kid when he start SR.
A good boy like Ross doesn't belong in prison, but the person arrested for smoking crack does, is a common sentiment.
(I think.)
But the inconsistency comes from people advocating for a black market drug site and bending towards the far right. The same people who in the same breath also further criminalize drugs, reduce access to things that help addicts while arguing that drug dealers should be deported and our streets swept.
The logical inconsistency is that 'their' drug dealers are conducted by people of virtue therefore they did nothing to break the law. And not being willing to deal with the actual fallout of said illegal drug empire.
Political coalitions are not personifiable, contiguous entities. There are disparate groups of individuals aligned on certain issues and at each other's throats elsewhere. That said, political hypocrisy isn't uncommon, but in this case you may be over-generalizing.
If however you shoot up and become violent, harass people, or commit properly crime you should go to jail.
How do republicans in Idaho (who don't even have medical marijuana on the books), defend Trump pardoning someone convicted of drug trafficking?
Trump isn't up for re-election. It's his act alone.
He promised in the election to pardon other criminals and it didn't hurt him.
You could ask the same of any deal: Why not instead of years ago? Because the deal wasn't available years ago.
the mormon ones would be the most likely that would object, but even plenty of the republican/libertarian mormons i know are happy to have the massive government overreach corrected.
Substantiating my obliterated sibling comment:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
It's pretty obvious which ones are doing it for themselves.
This could have waited until after the midterms.
A lot of republicans want a working economy. High paying jobs, low taxes.
A lot of republicans believe in a free market economy. Freedom to innovate, freedom to hire and fire.
And then we have this.
wow, not even god could eliminate sin but apparently the republicans can?
how do you envision that being enforced? death penalty for any sin? You've never made a sin yourself? If so how could you live in sin-free city? sounds sick and dystopian.
anyway, the point i wanted to make was that when you vote for somebody, you are the one giving that person the authority to take actions on your behalf. if you voted for T, you shouldn't complain about anything he does, because he can only do so because of your vote. learn to be wary of politicians, they treat you right during the dates (election) but after the wedding the true person comes out.
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
People hate congress. Yet each person can vote to only change one congressman at a time.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
October of 2001 they were up to 80% approval. Left to their own devices by Aug 2002 they were below 50%.
There's an argument to be made that congress doesn't really represent the people at large. Some people go on to make the argument that through gerrymandering politicians choose who's elected, and not the people.
I'd like to see some ranked choice voting.
On the contrary, he can just bury it in the first 48 hours. This will fade into the background soon enough but that group is kept happy.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/deli...
when there's political gain, sure
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate (to overcome the filibuster, also not as many Dems congressmen supported it as you might think). Neither did Clinton (people thought it would happen then)
> when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me."
How could he get it through the Senate without a filibuster-proof majority?
Let's go through Trump's campaign promises: Infrastructure, Border wall, increased US manufacturing, repealing ACA, "drain the swamp". He achieved zero of those.
Biden in contrast followed up on his campaign promises: Infrastructure, increased US manufacturing, expanding ACA plus lowering costs. Among others.
That's a really low bar with that bit added. "I didn't say it would be easy" was his line about his token tariffs the first term ... then he never tried again for the rest of that term.
that was Obama - Biden never promised that
Biden delivered on the IRA and climate change bill.
Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and filled it instead. I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled - he didn't even build the wall (probably his main promise).
https://jacobin.com/2022/08/joe-biden-public-option-health-c...
I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled
Renegotiate NAFTA
Lower Taxes
Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Nominate to the Supreme Court from the list he shared
Kill TPP
No Social Security Cuts
Take No Salary
Where he failed, it generally wasn't for trying, but because he was getting blocked by Congress, the courts, and the general bureaucracy. You only have to look at the last 48 hours to see a better prepared Trump committed to his promises.
One of the big reasons I voted for him. He actually keeps the promises he made as far reality will allow.
What's really stupid is that keeping promises made isn't the norm for politicians, of all kinds.
Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.
The tweet:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881524296386031892
There are no mandatory maximums in sentencing guidelines. Just mandatory minimums.
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8ofi6U0eWE
The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
I'd argue promoting that narrative was ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
She was a tireless advocate for his release from the start, and it became a part of the libertarian cause to see him released.
It worked. Trump courted the libertarian vote, and this was his most popular promise to them.
She's an inspiring woman. I'm so glad she lived to see this.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
B) I don’t see this sort of leniency being offered to other drug dealers, in fact, the Trump administration wants to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
C) a day 1 pardon communicates that it’s a top priority of the administration that drug dealers and cop killers (Jan 6) get freed.
D) he was convicted by a jury of his peers who know full well what a judge would sentence him to. Now Trump comes out to overrule that.
The time to change sentencing would have been pre-trial. We tried doing that, but that was a massive loser electorally.