Ross Ulbricht got 2xLife+40 for a Harmless Website

[Karl]

Hi David.

I visited silk road when it was running.

It didn't sell assassination.  Ulrich had a policy against this.

It mostly wasn't about drugs.  Drugs were one of many product categories it
provided.  It was mostly normal things, to support the use of bitcoin.

A significant portion of drug purchases appeared to be marijuana, which is
now legal in many states.

People on the site also sold hard drugs, and services for anonymously
transferring mail deliveries to people.

It is not illegal to provide a marketplace.  It seems to me the portal
provided an avenue for hunting down anyone selling these drugs, because
they were using the normal postal service to do so.

I expect that Ulbricht is serving a sentence far in excess of their crime,
because the site was competing with existing criminal marketplaces, and
refused to play their game.

If Ulbricht had real ties to the real black market, clients and partners
would have protected the site from being taken down, like apparently
happens in other situations.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 1425 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20210627/adeb5352/attachment.txt>