Maryland Indictment Says Silk Road Founder Tried To Arrange Murder of Employee 294
Robotron23 writes "Further charges have been made against Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht, aka 'Dread Pirate Roberts'. Yesterday saw the shutdown of Silk Road, a website Ulbricht founded which specialized in the sale of illegal items such as recreational drugs. As well as paying for a hit on a forum member, Ulbricht later requested an undercover agent murder an arrested employee of Silk Road, terming it 'the right move.' Upon receiving staged photos of torture and eventually the corpse, Ulbricht paid in full."
Re:No. The cat has FriendlyChemists tongue Slashdo (Score:5, Informative)
"So, in other words, the FBI is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder."
What part of "staged photos" do you not understand?
Re:Toooootally Didn't See That Coming (Score:5, Informative)
Re:bitcoin value (Score:5, Informative)
I was curious what was all the huss around the bit coin mining about. Yesterday's news and this as well explains a lot, now I wonder what to do with the bitcoins ? Are there any similar uses of this currency that i do not know of?
Similar uses? Well, there's still other black market sites along the same lines as Silk Road, such as Sheep Marketplace [slashdot.org] and Black Market Reloaded [5onwnspjvuk7cwvk.onion].
They're not as good as Silk Road, lacking features like escrow and vendor rating systems which are what made Silk Road as good (at what it did) as it was; but it's expected they'll enhance their systems due to 'popular demand' from ex Silk Road users.
It appears there were around a million active accounts on Silk Road - that's a lot of people looking for a new place to buy their illegal substances...
If however your question was about more 'innocuous' uses of BitCoins, you may want to start here [spendbitcoins.com].
Re:Credible, unfortunately. (Score:5, Informative)
Nailed it.
Ulbricht called himself an "agorist" [wikipedia.org]. Agorism is a strong form of anarcho-capitalist politics, which believes the if the state were to disappear a peaceful utopia would result. It explicitly rejects the political process as a means to bring about this change. Instead agorists believe in "counter economics", i.e. engaging in illegal activity not in order to benefit from it per se but rather to undermine the state and bring about an agorist world.
Agorists are often inspired by the writings of a guy called Murray Rothbard, and Ulbricht was fond of quoting Rothbard in order to explain why he thought certain ways. Rothbard DID believe in voting as a means to bring about change, and was thus not strictly an agorist. However if you actually read Rothbards writings (he wrote a book), then you will find it relatively empty of insight - he is the kind of person who makes a statement that seems reasonable, and then repeatedly extrapolates it in steps, until it becomes something that is flatly contradicted by observable reality. You can read what he thought about cartels and monopolies [mises.org] for an example of this kind of thinking. He concludes based on a long and twisty argument that cartels are inherently unstable and monopolies aren't a problem (because eventually a competitor will arise ... somehow), which doesn't match how real markets seem to work.
DPR is thus a man who frequently quotes an overly simplistic book of philosophy that provides no evidence for its claims, and uses it to justify a quest to overthrow civilisation via crime in order to established a promised utopia. That description reminds me of another category of criminal that has occupied a lot of attention from western governments in the last decade.