[zanek]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???

[loeg]

People regularly die from drinking alcohol. Should liquor store owners be doing life in prison? (And why are Australians special?)

[TrackerFF]

If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.

Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.

[Workaccount2]

Ironically silk road had much safer drugs than whatever pills you would get on the corner.

[Capricorn2481]

The Silk Road was "the corner." Do you think it would be any safer if it was running today? That makes 0 sense.

[Workaccount2]

Sellers had ratings and reputations. It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out.

Drug producers want pure products. It's almost entirely middlemen who cut drugs with whatever random chemicals they have on hand.

[Capricorn2481]

> It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out

Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?

Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.

For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.

[paulddraper]

What if they contain pure ethanol, and people end up dying from drinking said ethanol?

[mihaaly]

Why not incarcerate all car makers and doctors then too?

You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

You look lost to me because you equate law and morality at a deep level.

[mihaaly]

Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.

There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Look maybe I’m just stupid, but I still can’t tell what you’re trying to say. If you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, I apologize.

[johnnyanmac]

>Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.

There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.

And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.

[butlike]

Nobody cares.

Also alcohol = drug = substance = molecule. IT all depends on how you morally frame it.

[aleign]

Law is based on a common consensus of morality (at least in theory) so they are, in fact deeply intertwined.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I don’t think that’s true. Maybe in its infancy law really looks like that, but as societies grow their law books get more complex and can very easily become separated from majority perception of morality. Does morality explain zoning laws, or is it more about the equilibrium point of a pluralist conflict, everyone looking out for their interests, etc.

[johnnyanmac]

Roughly. But always read between the lines and follow the money. We didn't selectively ban Tiktok because government finally woke up to the dangers of social media.

[fsflover]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790443

[paulddraper]

You understand that incarcerating liquor store owners was the absurdity part of the argument, yes?

[johnnyanmac]

Doctors can be arrested for malpractice. I sure do wish we could arrest some of these car makers for telling staff to skimp on details and taking "recalls" as a cost of doing business, but that's an issue for another time.

> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?

[loeg]

Yeah, that also seems plausibly consistent with zanek's simplistic argument.

[realce]

The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.

SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.

These are not comparable institutions.

[krispyfi]

You're right. Ross should have been granted a drug selling license, analogous to a liquor license, and it should have been revoked if he failed to check ID before allowing people to make purchases on his marketplace.

[loeg]

Teenagers routinely drink alcohol and sometimes die.

[xmprt]

And businesses that knowingly sell alcohol to minors are charged with a crime.

[echoangle]

Sure, but the crime isn’t murder. And they aren’t getting life for it.

[Pesthuf]

If their business sold alcohol to as many teenagers as the Silk Road has sold drugs, then yes, they would get life.

[paulddraper]

Do they get multiple life sentences?

[mrcwinn]

The law recognizes that a bottle of beer generally cannot be used to murder someone else.

[rpmisms]

But it easily can. Break the end off and poke.

[beowulfey]

and if a store was selling broken bottles as weapons that would probably face some legal action

[rpmisms]

Maybe. That would probably legally qualify as a knife.

[echoangle]

And stores are not allowed to sell knifes due to the danger to others?

[karles]

No more shoelaces - they are weapons.

Next up - THOUGHTPOLICING!

[rpmisms]

You joke, but the ATF museum has within it a shoelace that is registered as a machine gun.

[Whatarethese]

Charles Manson never murdered anyone. Should his sentence been commuted?

[kybernetyk]

Obama ordered a drone strike on a wedding killing 500 people - yet he's walking free.

It's almost as if the state was a highly immoral construct.

Read Hoppe.

[the-dude]

I am trying to find the incident you are referring to. Do you have any links/sources?

[gizmo]

Very off-topic but it's this: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...

GP misremembered what the 500 casualties number refers to (see article).

[nurumaik]

Idk about silk road, but hydra (russian online marketplace) was the best thing that happened to russia drug market. It had very good reputation system and even labs that did random testing of drugs being sold

Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs

[popcalc]

Russians must have become experts at geocaching with all their experience chasing dead-drops.

[nurumaik]

It really surprises me that it's not widely used in the rest of the world

[shawabawa3]

> Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road

more or less than those who bought drugs from street dealers?

could it not be possible the silk road saved the lives of many more teenagers who would have died from street drugs otherwise?

[gizmo]

I don't think those types of hypotheticals are taken very seriously in court rooms. One, they are effectively unfalsifiable, because it's a about harm that could have happened but didn't. Two, they can be applied universally. Any action might have prevented a catastrophe, after all. Courts persecute based on laws broken and harm done.

Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.

[Jensson]

Manslaughter is at most 10 years, he served 12 years, I feel its fair to release him now.

[throwawaythekey]

As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:

1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.

2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).

Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.

[danw1979]

An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.

On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.

The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.

[aleign]

1/5 stars. Quick and discreet delivery. Minus 4 stars because it killed me.

[kybernetyk]

Smart people can differentiate between a market place and the sellers themselves.

[TrackerFF]

If you knowingly operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold, you very much bear some responsibility of those injuries.

If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.

Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.

[defrost]

> If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone,

This seems unlikely given he's been imprisoned for eleven years.

See: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

You can clearly see that "deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl)" didn't particularly alter or rise until after the 2013 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down of the Silk Road website and arrest of Ulbricht.

If the Silk Road Marketplace had any influence on fentanyl deaths Then some kind of spike would be expected during the years of operation, 2011-2013.

[IMTDb]

So I could bring down eBay by opening a store; selling something that I know (but eBay doesn't) is dangerous / broken / false. If that sale goes through, should eBay be taken down since they operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold ? eBay cannot reasonably test every single item that is sold through their platform. Same goes for every second hand marketplace in the world. They need to take some measure to address this, but cannot reduce the risk to 0.

As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.

[ValueAddedRS]

This theory was actually tested last year and...eBay won.

The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.

There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.

In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.

DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.

Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.

[echoangle]

Ebay tries to prevent you from selling illegal stuff though. Silk Road didn't. The reputation system was to prevent scams and bad quality products, not to prevent illegal transactions, right?

[stickfigure]

A large minority of the population (and in some cases, like weed, an overt majority) of the population don't think those transactions should be illegal. "The law is wrong" is sort of the whole point, and why Ulbricht is a quasi-folk hero.

[indoordin0saur]

It's a philosophical difference. As someone running a market where buyers and sellers meet I think it's valid to let the buyers and sellers participate in the exchange among themselves at their own risk. The person running the market doesn't need to treat the participants like children. Plus, if you're on the TOR network and buying obscure research chems using crypto in the early 2010s I think it's safe to assume you're more sophisticated and aware of what you're getting into than the average person.

[loeg]

Silk Road (shut down 2013) more or less entirely predated illicit fentanyl's dominance of the opioid market.

[kypro]

I think there is some difference between running a marketplace which you intend for people to sell products legally on, and a marketplace which you intend and know people will sell products illegally on.

Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.

Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.

Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.

I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.

[pjc50]

This is why people only blame the DZOQBX brands that sell on Amazon for review fraud and not Amazon themselves, who are blamelessly hosting all those fraudulent sellers.

[etc-hosts]

I totally blame Amazon!

[chrishare]

He tried to have people murdered for his own benefit.

[kybernetyk]

Well, he should have get sentenced for that then. And not for running a neutral market place.

[zanek]

Silk Road was a neutral marketplace ? What kind of drugs are you on ? Or are you just completely not aware of what happened

Ross willingly sold weapons, body parts, etc on it. He personally ok'ed the sale of these things (text proof from the prosecution)

[tene80i]

Do these smart people you speak of think things that are different are entirely unrelated?

[cbsmith]

Smart people can differentiate between a transparent marketplace which provides a net economic benefit to society from an obfuscated one which by design enables illicit activity.

[aleign]

Smart people realize that it is not so black and white.

[cbsmith]

Definitely.

[zanek]

your argument is actually quite dumb, because they have messages from Ross giving the OK to sell most of these things.

He wasnt some hands off executive who had no idea. Smart people should be able to not equate an illegal market place with a legal market place

[goosejuice]

Coltec, Sterigenics, UCC/UCIL, DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow, Mallinckrodt, Imperial Sugar, BP, A.A.R. Contractors, W.R. Grace, PG&E, Perdue Pharma.

So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.

Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.

You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.

[buckle8017]

Body parts? huh

[bogota]

Maybe spend a little less time reading propaganda.

[butterlesstoast]

Wait… you’ve clearly never used The Silk Road, have you?

[theodric]

You don't have to answer that question.

[yieldcrv]

The government should have investigated the people that listed and sourced the drugs

this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately

but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was

[tomjen3]

People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.

But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.

[slashdev]

Plus he tried to hire a hitman to kill someone. Ten years sentence seems a little light for that alone.

[golly_ned]

He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.

[dbspin]

Hard disagree - Zuckerberg absolutely is responsible for inadequately policing calls for genocide on his platform. Just as every social network is responsible for policing child abuse materials. Should they be punished for such content being uploaded? Of course not. They should face punishment where their wilful failure to police such content results in active harm. Facebook's utterly irresponsible behaviour in Myanmar is a great example - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...

He also directly attempted to have someone murdered, which is a very serious crime in any country. The guy is not a hero. - https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...

[golly_ned]

I didn’t say Zuck isn’t responsible for the ills of his platform. I said DPR is no more responsible than Zuck or Spiegel. That is, that there’s a distinction between facilitating a drug deal and dealing drugs, just as there is a distinction from managing a communication platform that promotes hate speech and violence.

That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.

[suddenlybananas]

You have to understand that half of the people here are libertarians who never grew out of their teenage philosophy.

[knodi]

drugs is one part, but silkroad facilitated more than drug, guns, fake documents, stolen data, money laundering, fake currency, contract killers... the list goes on.

[loeg]

Are you confusing SR with other darknet markets? SR explicitly banned most of these things (guns, fake currency, stolen data, contract killers). Yes, fake documents were allowed.

[gosub100]

Did you just make a "think of the children" argument? Teens are well known to engage in risk taking. Why not prosecute the parents?

[cortesoft]

People have died from things bought on Amazon, too

Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.