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zanek | on: Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
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 ???
loeg | parent | next
People regularly die from drinking alcohol. Should liquor store owners be doing life in prison? (And why are Australians special?)
TrackerFF | root | parent | next
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.

Workaccount2 | root | parent | next
Ironically silk road had much safer drugs than whatever pills you would get on the corner.
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paulddraper | root | parent
What if they contain pure ethanol, and people end up dying from drinking said ethanol?
mihaaly | root | parent | next
Why not incarcerate all car makers and doctors then too?

You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

BriggyDwiggs42 | root | parent | next
You look lost to me because you equate law and morality at a deep level.
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paulddraper | root | parent | next
You understand that incarcerating liquor store owners was the absurdity part of the argument, yes?
johnnyanmac | root | parent | next
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?

loeg | root | parent
Yeah, that also seems plausibly consistent with zanek's simplistic argument.
realce | root | parent | next
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.

These are not comparable institutions.

krispyfi | root | parent | next
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.
loeg | root | parent | next
Teenagers routinely drink alcohol and sometimes die.
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| root | parent
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mrcwinn | root | parent | next
The law recognizes that a bottle of beer generally cannot be used to murder someone else.
rpmisms | root | parent
But it easily can. Break the end off and poke.
beowulfey | root | parent | next
and if a store was selling broken bottles as weapons that would probably face some legal action
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karles | root | parent
No more shoelaces - they are weapons.

Next up - THOUGHTPOLICING!

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Whatarethese | root | parent
Charles Manson never murdered anyone. Should his sentence been commuted?
kybernetyk | root | parent
Obama ordered a drone strike on a wedding killing 500 people - yet he's walking free.

It's almost as if the state was a highly immoral construct.

Read Hoppe.

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nurumaik | parent | next
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

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shawabawa3 | parent | next
> Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road

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?

gizmo | root | parent
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.

Jensson | parent | next
Manslaughter is at most 10 years, he served 12 years, I feel its fair to release him now.
throwawaythekey | parent | next
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.

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kybernetyk | parent | next
Smart people can differentiate between a market place and the sellers themselves.
TrackerFF | root | parent | next
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.

defrost | root | parent | next
> If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone,

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.

IMTDb | root | parent | next
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.

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indoordin0saur | root | parent | next
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.
loeg | root | parent
Silk Road (shut down 2013) more or less entirely predated illicit fentanyl's dominance of the opioid market.
kypro | root | parent | next
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.

pjc50 | root | parent | next
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.
etc-hosts | root | parent
I totally blame Amazon!
chrishare | root | parent | next
He tried to have people murdered for his own benefit.
kybernetyk | root | parent
Well, he should have get sentenced for that then. And not for running a neutral market place.
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tene80i | root | parent | next
Do these smart people you speak of think things that are different are entirely unrelated?
cbsmith | root | parent | next
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.
aleign | root | parent
Smart people realize that it is not so black and white.
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zanek | root | parent
your argument is actually quite dumb, because they have messages from Ross giving the OK to sell most of these things.

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

goosejuice | parent | next
Coltec, Sterigenics, UCC/UCIL, DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow, Mallinckrodt, Imperial Sugar, BP, A.A.R. Contractors, W.R. Grace, PG&E, Perdue Pharma.

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.

bogota | parent | next
Maybe spend a little less time reading propaganda.
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yieldcrv | parent | next
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

tomjen3 | parent | next
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.

slashdev | parent | next
Plus he tried to hire a hitman to kill someone. Ten years sentence seems a little light for that alone.
golly_ned | parent | next
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.
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suddenlybananas | parent | next
You have to understand that half of the people here are libertarians who never grew out of their teenage philosophy.
knodi | parent | next
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.
loeg | root | parent
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.
gosub100 | parent | next
Did you just make a "think of the children" argument? Teens are well known to engage in risk taking. Why not prosecute the parents?
cortesoft | parent
People have died from things bought on Amazon, too

Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.