You could order Marijuana with your Pizza in DC, 7 years back when I was there. The smart move is to end the war on domestic Drugs and close the door on Cartel drugs. Hope Trump deploys troops to the regions controlled by the Cartel. Mexico need step up or give it up. Can't play US bully rhetoric when Cartel runs your show. The Israel's would describe it as a secure buffer safety zone

This post was edited by RedFromWinter on Jan 22 2025 09:11am

Trump promised the libertarians that he would if he won. He followed through.

I wanna know how much crypto homeboy has hidden away. Even in 2021 they just found out about 50,000 btc that they missed before.

He's smiling cause he's free, but also cause he's billionaire.

yo hes smiling because he has a little plant in a cup

10 years in prison seems a reasonable sentence for someone knowingly facilitating the drug trade through pure commerce without any involvement in production or distribution
two life sentences + 40 years does not

That poor asian fat guy, IDK what he was doing not fleeing to china or elsewhere.
He literally made one mistake and sent a piss ant amount from another wallet into his I'll gotten gains wallet, and the feds showed up and took his shit.
Worst of all when the government took all of his worldly assets they fined him like $40 million dollars on top of that.
He delivers food now, and is $40 million dollars in debt he cannot discharge.

This post was edited by PapaPsych on Jan 23 2025 12:13am

Agreed. Though it seems worse than that. Seems he didn't create Silk Road with any particular intent for drugs to be sold, but instead as a Bitcoin marketplace. The FIRST bitcoin marketplace. He simply did not put any restrictions on what could be bought or sold.

So, the fact that drugs were purchased and sold wasn't on his radar at all. He wasn't a "drug facilitator", but rather he simply offered a marketplace that didn't target drug sales. Which honestly makes sense, as it's law enforcement's responsibility to go after criminals, not business owners.

Seems like a good pardon, ngl.

i agree the pardon was good, but at the time of the silk road creation bitcoin's only use was to buy drugs more or less. first phase of BTC was the white page dreamers who bought in for it as a non-state sanctioned currency. but pretty early on it became clear there would be a long phase of criminality for BTC transactions. anyone savvy enough to understand BTC back then and create a website to use it knew it was for drugs and not much else. i dont think any jury would be dissuaded from his personal responsibility on the drug sales side, even without ever touching a single drug in any transaction. you'd have to demonstrate a massive level of naivety on Rich's behalf that i just dont see as possible. he's like a grandma who's grandson sells drugs, they see random people coming in and leaving 20 times a day, they know.

You claim that, but I highly doubt it's the truth. Lots of people end up with lots of digital currency that is relatively meaningless to them. Lots of other people end up with lots of extra "stuff" that they'd rather not have, and see opportunity in trading it for random digital currencies. Look at the RLT forum in donor forum, which pre-existed Silk Road by what, half a decade?

Further, not all nations have laws against drug purchase, sale, or use. And again, it's not the responsibility of a mall owner to enforce the law on the businesses and customers conducting business in their mall. That's the responsibility of law enforcement. This appears no different to me.

Also, I would consider the antics of crypto-holders who mass bought out video cards and other tech with bitcoin only to relist them at 3-5x the price on Amazon, ebay, etc. from 2015-2017 to be far, far worse than some ecurrency marketplace not targeting drug sales. Entire industries were massively negatively impacted, and in many cases US businesses were prevented from upgrading their tech to remain modern, current, and competitive. Not just with each other, but with those industries in foreign nations.

The charges in their entirety seem like bullshit to me. NGL.

all any prosecutor would need to do is present a list of all of the transactions on silk road. that's a list the owner has and as owner of the business would review. when it shows that something like 95% of all transactions were drug purchases, boom case closed.

you may be able to claim in court you created the site with no intent to act as a drug market. that wipes out most of the worst charges given they'd require premediated intent as well as some sort of advertisement informing users that's what the site is for. but once you have a ledger? well, hard to deny any amount of responsibility at that point even acting as a peer to peer marketplace.

using the d2jsp forum as an example if someone offered to sell 10 tabs of acid in the RLT forum you can bet it would be taken down.

for the record if i could use zero legal codes and just lob in a punishment i'd say fines not jailtime would be the correct call. recoup some of the BTC and sell it off or have them sell it to pay the fine. 40 years and all of the BTC seized was just a cash grab by the govt.

on the tangent i also hate retail arbitrage, and think those people are scum, whether its video game systems, concert tickets, or video cards. just shitty people.

RLT is neither an open nor unmonitored marketplace.

You're attempting to conflate an owner of a Mall or Marketplace with the owner of a business. Silk Road did not sell ANY products. Silk Road did not buy ANY products. Silk Road, from what I can discover about it, was merely a bitcoin processor/intermediary. They were effectively acting like Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard, along with providing vendors (be they businesses or individuals) a place where they can conduct their business.

People use payment transfers to pay for drugs, prostitutes, and even murder all the time. Should Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, etc. be held liable for those transfers? Or, once again, are the sellers/buyers of drugs responsible for what they sell/buy? Again, it is NOT the responsibility of the mall owner to police the actions of a business within their mall. It is the responsibility of the POLICE to enforce the law.

And yet again, not all nations have laws banning drugs, or their sales or purchase, and silk road catered to all bitcoin transactions internationally. So even claiming that all the drug sales that took place were illegal in the first place isn't correct.