Trial of The Dread Pirate Roberts.

[HairOfTheDog]

As you said, I think he does deserve to be punished. When a 16 year old buys alcohol at a bar and then crashes his car and dies, both the bartender and the owner of the bar are responsible. I think Ross never sold drugs personally, but he owned the establishment and was wrong. Unfortunately, I think the only way to find out what he was doing was for LE to break the law themselves, which means they have no moral high ground to throw stones. But I think the gov't as a whole doubled down on their wrongdoing when the judge was what appears to be very biased.

A bar owner pushes a legal product/service via his/her employees to his/her customers. The bar owner is personally a seller of booze, whether it's served by bartenders or the owner himself.

Silk Road pushed illegal products/services between buyers/sellers via transactions enabled by himself and his administrators. So, like the bar owner, Ulbricht was in fact personally selling drugs and contraband, in my view. Unlike the bar owner, by simply owning the enterprise/establishment, Ulbricht was the head of a criminal network.

Trying to drum up business by linking Silk Road on other forums using his Google account was an asinine move by an otherwise very crafty dude.

Aside from the Bitcoin-thieving agent, I'm not clear what you think was done illegally by the government. I understood that they had probable cause and warrants to search the virtual premises (that's how I envision it). Hell, probable cause could be established just by visiting the Silk Road site.



Are you suggesting that the fact that the server was located in Iceland made the US warrants invalid?

I'll have to watch the documentary soon Cutz. I'm sure there are a lot of pieces that were not covered in the news stories I've read.