1)Today Ross Ulbricht starts his tenth year in prison for creating and running Silk Road, the first mass-marketed point-and-click #darkweb drugs bazaar. People often ask my opinion of Ross and his sentence. It’s complicated, but here goes. A #Thread 🧵
2)Ross Ulbricht is arguably one of the most influential figures of last decade. I’ll try and explain my reasoning. This is going to be long
3)First about my relationship with Silk Road. I wasn’t just reporting on it, I was part of it from almost the beginning right through to its end and beyond. I was the first regular contributor to the forums to be open and honest about who I was.
4)I spent some of every single day there for over two years
5)I’m a drug law reform advocate. I believe all drugs should be legal, that most drug use is of minimal harm, and that abuse and addiction should be dealt with as a health issue, not a criminal issue
6)So when I discovered Silk Road, with its reviews and star ratings and its Number 1 Rule - you may not sell anything the purpose of which is to harm or defraud another person, - I was intrigued. I was on board.
7)For recreational drug users, it offered a safer alternative to buying them from friends or local dealers. But most fascinating was the forum, full of interesting chat and a surprising lack of trolls.
8)Many people resented having a journo openly taking part in their forums, but I gained endorsements by Silk Road staff and respected vendors, who recognised SR was not supposed to be a secret, but was supposed to be open to all
9)As well as writing for mainstream press in Australia, I ran a blog chronicling all things dark web, but mostly Silk Road. allthingsvice.com
10)Vendors and buyers alike began messaging me, wanting to tell their stories. I learned opsec and PGP from the Silk Road security gurus, and harm reduction from Doctor X
11)When I said I was writing a book, vendors, staff and DPR were all supportive.
12)I took part in film nights and debates and arguments. I reported on the exit scams, the arrests, the sales and giveaways, the quirky people, the competition. I dissected the lengthy missives of Admin/Silk Road, later “Dread Pirate Roberts”
13)Someone on Silk Road had a sig: “I came for the drugs. I stayed for the revolution”. It genuinely felt like that
14)Remember, this was the experience projected to the user base. Vendors were nerds with computers. The closest it got to violence was DDoS attacks by competitors. We had no idea what was going on behind the scenes
15)The Silk Road we knew turned out to be a bit of a facade. Though some vendors may have been nerds with computers, others had ties to organised crime. The kilo-level deals weren’t happening in public
16)The shift to online for recreational drug users is here to stay, and Silk Road showed that a different way was not just possible, but very lucrative indeed
17)Now, perhaps controversially, I am going to contend that Bitcoin/cryptocurrency would not be where it is today without Ross Ulbricht
18)Satoshi Nakamoto may have invented Bitcoin, but it really didn’t do anything until Ross Ulbricht provided a genuine robust use case for the cryptocurrency: Silk Road
19)You may think if it hadn’t been Ross, it was inevitable that someone else would have developed a darknet drugs market using Bitcoin at some point, and this is probably true. But…
20)…would anyone else have run the market with the same integrity and customer focus as Silk Road? It’s doubtful. Someone else would have started the site purely as a money-making venture, not as a revolutionary experiment
21)In someone else’s hands, it would have been a failure for users who lost their money. The rules and philosophies wouldn’t have been there. The owner would have pulled as soon as the accounts hit the first $mil
22)(Remember, it wasn’t just escrow back then. Users held ALL their Bitcoin on the site - Silk Road *was* their wallet. There would have been a $mil sitting under SR’s control very early)
23)Instead, the user experience was an almost seamless couple of years of high-quality drugs, delivered to their door. For many, they were basically free drugs, as the value of the Bitcoin in their accounts increased faster than they could spend it
24)It was also a community and for many, the genuine belief that they were part of something special
25)Cryptocurrency may well have been inevitable, but it was Silk Road that catapulted its price and made the world take notice
26)Now, what about the murders for hire?
27)On that, I have no doubt that they occurred as reported, much as I desperately wanted that not to be the case.
28)The chat logs weren’t faked. Both of the other participants, Inigo (Andrew Jones) and Variety Jones (Roger Clark) have admitted to them
29)There was no “multiple DPRs” (and believe me, I was one of the first to muse upon the possibility, and believed there might be when the change of tone came along back when Silk Road was still running strong)
30)Even if others logged on to the forums with the DPR moniker (something I doubt, but is possible), that is a completely separate thing to the private chat logs that were on Ulbricht’s computer
31)While I can see why DPR felt like he was backed into a corner - a hazard of doing business with major criminals, especially anonymous ones - I can’t condone the choices he made
32)However, just because I believe this to be the case, doesn’t change the fact that Ulbricht was never convicted of anything relating to the hits.
33)Rather, the chat logs were allowed as evidence of willingness to commit violence in the furtherance of carrying on a criminal enterprise - i.e. the “kingpin charge”
34)The kingpin charge is a somewhat nebulous catch-all, usually reserved for the heads of bloodthirsty cartels who oversee torture and murders. I doubt the rap sheet of others convicted of that charge will look anything like Ross Ulbricht’s
35)So though I understand how the sentence came about, I believe it is manifestly excessive for the crimes he actually committed
36)I believe it was more about sending a message, punishment for the embarrassment to the authorities that Silk Road’s very existence caused and retribution for the disproportionate amount of resources spent chasing the Dread Pirate Roberts for 2.5 years
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
