Ross Ulbricht arrested at the age of 29. He is now 40 years old. He faces a double sentence of life in prison plus 40 years without the option of parole to create the Silk Road, a dark drug market that has facilitated $1. 2 billion in Bitcoin-denominated transactions.
“I’m going to spend the next few decades in this cage. Then, a century later, I will grow old and die. I’m even though it’s all going to jail, yet I’ll be in a bag of alcohol,” he told an interviewer at a virtual blockchain convention in 2021.
But a possibility for the moment may come for Ulbricht, from a Savior.
“If you vote for me, on day one, I will do the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht,” Trump told a crowd of attendees at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.
Trump has reached an agreement with the Libertarian Party. And now, Ulbricht probably wouldn’t have to pass his middle and old age bars. He wouldn’t have to die in a body bag if Trump helps keep his promise.
Will?
Over the next few months, Justice Department lawyers and Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers may keep lies about Ulbricht for Trump to adjust his mind. They may fall back on some of their draconian instincts. They may check to stop some of the disastrous effects of the war on drugs.
But Trump forgets about the saboteurs and keeps his promise to lose Ulbricht. Here’s why:
Ulbricht’s arrest on Oct. 1, 2013, at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library was like a scene from an action movie. Downloading an interview with Vince Gilligan, the author of Breaking Bad, he was managing the Silk Road in some other browser window.
FBI agents in the canopy staged a physical combat against him. When he turned his head to practice the concussion, another officer booted up his computer before he could close the canopy, which would have encrypted the contents of his hard drive.
The FBI helps keep a PC symbol in the show as a hunting trophy.
But Ulbricht N’t Walter White, the frustrated chemistry instructor of the school that becomes a violent spine drug in the Gilligan series, driven by its thirst for strength and remuneration. Texas in Dallas for a complete scholarship. The passionate of libertarian philosophy and the Austrian economy, and Lee Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
He wrote on LinkedIn that he sought to use economic theory “as a way to abolish the use of coercion and aggression among humanity” and create “an economic simulation to give other people a first-hand look at what it would be like to live in a global without the systemic use of force. “
“I’m looking to do something right,” Ulbricht said in a 2021 criminal interview. “I’m looking to help us move forward. “
And he did. Ulbricht created an underground e-commerce online page called The Silk Road. He was its first salesman, promoting local psilocybin mushrooms. The Silk Road has the eBay of medicines, with trusted dealers earning top ratings and message boards full of tips for safer drug use. It has established a code of moral conduct: no false degrees, no child pornography, no stolen property. “Our fundamental regulations are to treat others as you would need to be treated and to do nothing to harm or defraud another person. “
“I seek to help us move toward a freer and fairer world,” Ulbricht said.
At the same time, the Obama Administration’s Justice Department pressures banks and credits card corporations to avoid serving gun shops, adult websites, and payday lenders, even though they were doing absolutely legal.
The Silk Road proved that with Bitcoin, you can buy things on the web without going through the payment rails that the government controlled. Online commerce was virtually unstoppable.
“At the time, Bitcoin made me feel like everything possible,” Ulbricht says in his criminal interview.
Ulbricht has become a hero of libertarians. But others say they gave him precisely what he deserved.
“Life in criminal without parole. Anyone else? Other sensible men need to do it?That’s what he’ll get,” he combined with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News at the time of sentencing.
For his part, Ulbricht is remorseful and pitiful, telling his criminal interviewer that “we all know that the road to hell is paved with intentions, and now I’m here. I’m in hell. “
Does it deserve this fate? While Ulbricht has become paranoid about getting caught, had he strayed from his ideals of brains and “broken badly” like Walter White?And does that mean Trump thinks twice before releasing him?
Ulbricht’s friends were shocked through his arrest. They described him as “soft,” “loyal” and “hitless and not aggressive. “He seems poetic and delicate in his works and an online interview with a friend published before his arrest, where he smells his first love and plans for the future.
But many of those opposed to Ulbricht’s launch say he was also a hired assassin, pointing to unloaded accusations that he tried to rent out blockbusters to take out virtual bandits on his tenure on the Silk Road.
But when you look closely, things get murky. Here’s what we know:
In creating their case, prosecutors relied on discussion records from a moment of crisis on the Silk Road. The site’s most productive administrator, Curtis Green, had just been arrested. It appears that he would have possibly stolen around $350,000 worth of Bitcoin.
“Nob,” a player on the Silk Road, chatting with the site’s most level-headed administrator, who called himself “fear of pirate Roberts. “He told Nob, “This will be the first time I have to call my muscle. “And I asked that “green rhythm and then forced to send the bitcoins he stole. “
Later that day, Pirate Dread Roberts Back sent a message Nob: Can you replace the order to execute that Torture?
Nob sent Dread Pirate Roberts’ photographs of what appeared to be tortured and killed to Curtis Green.
It turns out that Nob was DEA agent Carl Force, one of the two investigators in the case who went to prison for embezzlement of bitcoin investigation. He had staged Green’s murder as part of a stinging operation.
But Ulbricht’s defenders say the Pirate Dread Roberts who was chatting with the corrupt undercover agent who set up a fake stunt wasn’t Ross Ulbricht.
After all, the call encouraged through the movie The Princess Bride to describe a character inhabited over and over again through other Americans in many generations.
When Pirate Dread Roberts gave an interview to Forbes two months before Ulbricht’s arrest, he insisted that he was not the founder of the site.
“I didn’t start the Silk Road, my predecessor did,” he told the Forbes reporter, who pressed him to ask if he wrote the comments on the Silk Road forums. “The most I’m willing to reveal is that I’m not the first director of Silk Road,” the fearful pirate Roberts replied.
The jury has never noticed this interview. Green, the guy targeted for the fake move, said there were “other” people with the account, adding in.
Green told Ulbricht’s mother that it wasn’t Ulbricht who posted the heist and claims that the undercover agent, Carl Force (aka Nob), also had access to the account of the feared pirate Roberts.
There were successes also commissioned through the Roberts pirate fear that led to no known murder.
Federal prosecutors never charged Ulbricht with attempted murder, however, the federal prosecutor was tried who sentenced him to two life sentences plus 40 years without the option of parole, however, he referenced those episodes in his decision.
He also said Ulbricht serves as a public example to act as if “it is greater than the legislation of this country. “
Well, it is. The war on drugs is the genuine villain of their story. It charges $1 trillion while fueling decades of crime and black-market violence, which has higher as overdose deaths in the U. S. are at a premium. U. S. They have higher levels.
Black markets become violent because there are no legal mechanisms to enforce contracts, and their participants are desperate to avoid being caught, which is what happened to the Silk Road.
It’s ironic that Trump, the guy who unabashedly admires China and Singapore’s death penalty for drug traffickers, is the founder of the world’s first primary market for dark drugs.
But if there’s one thing Trump likes, it’s a bargain.
One of his boldest Crusade 2024 responses was with the Libertarian Party, which never wins but covers the spread in the narrow presidential election.
Trump showed up at his conference and proclaimed himself anything libertarian, to which he was met with a refrain of boos.
But the scenes, anything else was happening. Trump had made a deal with the Libertarian Party leadership: Don’t ruin this election for me and I’ll lose your son Ross.
Libertarian National Committee Chairwoman Angela McArdle rightly said that Trump’s former director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, organized an assembly between her and the president of Mar-a-Lago, the 2024 campaign.
“Rick [Grenell] is like, ‘Well, President Trump is a profession,'” McArdle says. “‘You ask for the world. You ask for anything you think you can get, and it’ll probably land in the middle. He likes to make offers. I’m eager to ask too much and hit Ross along the way. And he said, “I love to set other people free.
After the party’s nominating convention, McArdle promised that the party would only be its own candidate, Chase Oliver, in uncompetitive states that favor Democrats. Trump won narrow margins in several swing states, while the Libertarian Party finished with its lowest percentage of the vote in 16 years.
“It was kind of an excellent miracle, the way things were going with Chase [Oliver],” McArdle says. “It couldn’t have been greater to make sure that Donald Trump was incentivized to keep his promises and feel and that he wasn’t ‘I’m going to fuck myself on this issue. ‘
So now is the time for Trump to remain at his end of the negotiation.
The Silk Road began as Ulbricht’s idealistic attempt to make the black market position a little safer by creating a position where other people can read about buyers, in-person dichotic transactions, locate non-hygienic drugs, and protective percentage information.
That it turns out to have fallen prey to some of the same violent forces as everyone and everyone else on the black market in history only shows how complicated it is to solve the disruptions of prohibition, whether it’s violence or increasingly harmful artificial drugs like fentanyl, which drives the overdose epidemic and has only gotten worse since the closure of the Silk Road.
Unless, and until the government comes in and takes another one to drugs, our picks feel like the Silk Road and its many imitators since then, or the cartels.
While Trump has promised to “take down the cartels, just as we brought down the Islamic State’s caliphate,” history has shown that this is said to have been done. America attempted to “decapitate” the cartels in early 2010, and this led to an even bloodier scenario in Mexico.
The last war against the cartels created a vacuum cleaner that allowed the emergence of the remarkable “El Chapo”. Once it was stopped, others took its place, and the cartel was remodeled into a more decentralized and resilient “umbrella” structure. The new leadership has Fentanyl higher, with seizures nearly doubling 2021 and 2023.
As long as there is a mainstream call for drugs in the United States, it seems that there will be willing suppliers. The drip ban has failed, and no amount of bluster about the execution of dealers or the war in Mexico is likely to replace that.
But even if you disagree and think Trump can, even if the war on drugs wins everything, that still doesn’t justify keeping Ulbricht blocked in his 40s.
He served his time and expressed remorse.
“I am sorry to the extent that my movements have led to drug abuse and addiction,” he said in his interview in 2021.
He was a prisoner of style, pursuing his master’s degree in psychology, training and mediating the clash within, and collecting more than 150 signatures on his release from fellow inmates.
In every respect, this would be a far more defensible intervention than President Joe Biden’s self-centered forgiveness of his son Hunter for all the possible crimes spanning more than a decade.
Ulbricht, a first-time offender, has suffered enough. Donald Trump struck a deal, and many of Ulbricht’s supporters voted for him, or at least opposed him, because of that deal.
Possibly it would not be pretty, however, that is politics in twenty-first century America. Atrump was given what he wanted. Now it’s time to release Ulbricht.
*Correction: This post in the past included data on a defense offer.
Zach Weissmueller is a senior manufacturer in reason.
This modal will end in 10