[barrkel]

To my mind, it doesn't matter whether a murder actually occurred for Ulbricht's culpability. He thought he was ordering a murder, he solicited proof, he got proof, and he asked for more hits. In his frame, someone was murdered on his orders. It's a burden to prove for sure, but the fact that he paid substantial cash equivalents in bitcoin to me mean he didn't think he was playing some fantasy game with scammers.

[empathy_m]

The chat logs show that he was quite stoic about the whole thing and treated it as a mundane business action to protect himself ("is a liability and I wouldn't mind if…"; "I've received the picture and deleted it. Thank you again for your swift action.").

Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.