Oddbean

Really sorry to hear about your friends kid and I hope they get the help they need 🙏 🙏 That said, people have car crashes daily, should the car dealers be serving time? And with this line of thinking, all doctors should definitely be in jail. And the drug manufacturers both legal and illegal. Should the kids parents serve time for not being attentive enough to prevent their child from buying and doing drugs? And in Ross’s case should the the internet providers, computer manufacturers, the rare earth miners all serve time? and on it goes.. If someone apes into bitcoin and it drops 70% and they can’t pay their mortgage and the bank takes their house and their family is homeless, whose fault is it? I don’t have all the answers here, your post just really got me thinking.. Either we are empowered and responsible for our actions, or we are not and are thereby at the mercy of multitudes of external forces, many of which certainly do not have our well-being in mind. I don’t know if Ross should have served time, but he has, and way more than enough at this point.. and to be clear, he isn’t serving time because people sold drugs on a platform he created.. he is serving time because he allowed bitcoin to be the medium of exchange, that is what they fear.. Open to thoughts..

Philosophically I agree with you. But we have to draw the line somewhere. If no one follows the law however imperfect they might be, we would have anarchy. He knew what he was doing was illegal and he knew there will be severe consequences if he got caught. That being said Is it fair that they punished him with 2 life sentences? No.

Anarchy is not having no rules. It having no rulers. Who determines the laws? Who has a monopoly on violence to enforce those laws? Who decides the rules by which we live? Why must you be forced to follow the rules of others hundreds of miles away that understand nothing of you or your network or your morales? https://youtu.be/SqgZUzxbUis?si=rdiua-PT9c64E7cf

I hear you and glad you agree the punishment was (way) too severe. As for the law, that’s a tough one .. may have more easily agreed with you in the past, but more and more I see the ‘law’ being used and abused to the point that it has little real meaning to me anymore, in the sense that it is applied so randomly and *not* applied so extensively. All that aside, and bringing it back to this particular situation, there are so many nuances.. not the least of them being that I have heard people who used Silk Road say that for the first time they were able to buy drugs ‘safely’, both by getting reviews to verify purity and also by not having to go to dangerous areas to buy them, which they had and would have continued to do.. So from that angle one could argue that Ross was providing a much needed service.. Also it is highly likely that if a kid starts doing drugs, they would have done so regardless of the ‘point of sale’.. kids experiment and the drug epidemic is massive and all the kids I ever knew who did hard drugs didn’t buy them on Silk Road.. So I guess the question really is, do you think that drugs with an addictive nature should be banned, controlled and it made punishable to sell them at all? .. this would include all narcotic pain killers, anti-anxiety meds etc, which are widely prescribed way beyond necessity and without any proper guidance or support wrt their use. Like where is the line, and who gets to decide? What ‘should’ the punishment be, and who gets to decide? Our politics and courts are so beyond corrupted at this point, I guess my trust level is lower than I ever thought it could go … and I have always questioned authority, and I pretty much hate addictive, synthetic recreational drugs, so to be clear I am 100% not trying to advocate for them per se… just questioning how do we best govern ourselves and our communities?

I don’t have the answer. All I know is my friend’s kid got hooked on heroin, stopped going to school, turned to running drugs, stealing and robbing to support his habit and eventually ended up in prison. Could he have ended there regardless of Silk Road? Perhaps. They said Silk Road sold over 1B worth of drugs before being shut down. Is that enough to give Ross the Kingpin Status, that even a first-time conviction under could mean 20 years to life in federal prison? Technically, yes, because he took part of the proceed from every drug sale, but I am conflicted. 😐

Damn, so fkn sad, feel for him and his family 😔 And I too remain conflicted.. did he ‘sell’ the drugs or did he sell (by taking a cut) access to a platform that happened to be used by others to sell drugs? this being human is no small task.. Easy to complain about things, not so easy to come up with solutions that will *really* work for everyone, or even most. Effective governance (beyond oneself) remains a mystery, perhaps it always will be..