[FireBeyond]

Oh, come on. From Alex Winter:

"Silk Road Was Just Another Tech Company Outside of the tech press, Winter notes, a lot of the media coverage on the Silk Road has been “drugs and guns and hitmen—just wildly off-base.” Off-base, he says, because when he started interviewing the people who knew Silk Road he didn’t see an outfit that was all that different from those littering Silicon Valley. “I started to meet all these core architects within the Silk Road: vendors, engineers, sellers, administrators, people who were helping with scaling,” he says. “It’s obvious in retrospect but it was just like any large tech company. But it was just not represented that way in the media, so even I was caught off-guard.”"[(http://www.wired.com/2015/05/deep-web-silk-road-alex-winter/...]

That's so disingenuous it's condescending. What the hell were they scaling, exactly? That Silk Road was a scaling experiment, not really a mechanism to sell drugs? Seriously?

[ubernostrum]

Ross was a sweet innocent boy who'd never ever hurt anyone, and who only wanted to implement a golden age of Libertopia by freeing people from the oppressive yoke of laws. Y'know, like laws against having other people killed in exchange for money.

The more I read about the guy, the more the root of the word "privilege" seems appropriate (i.e., private law -- he wanted one generous and lax law for him, and another violent and harsh law for the people who got in his way).