Oh… He’s not even the real Dread Pirate Roberts!
Didn’t Donald the Jester say something about fighting crime before the election? And then he drops thousands of hard criminals back on the street?
Based?
Why though?
I mean, who is looking at this and calling it an injustice?
Side note: does he get his bitcoin wallet back?
It was an injustice. He deserved time in prison for hiring fake hitmen in an attempt to get back at people, but he sure as hell didn’t deserve life in prison for it. And nobody should be in jail for selling drugs.
Ross is an idiot, but his punishment was the government making an example of him, and was way out of proportion to his crimes. The definition of injustice.
Side note: does he get his bitcoin wallet back?
Dude was deep into Bitcoin back when it was less than a dollar. If he diversified and stashed just a fraction of his holdings, he might now be one of the richest people on the planet.
Who says crime doesn’t pay? :/
Prison = forced hodling
He got more time than actual gang bangers without committing any violent crime. His sentence was way longer than it should have been.
I think the pot sales were probably not a huge deal, and some of the other recreational drugs too (I don’t think anyone should do those drugs, but I’m not going to restrict everyone else).
The hitman services listed and other illegal stuff was definitely an issue he deserved time for.
He was never criminally tried for those charges. That means just selling drugs have him two lifetimes in prison plus 40 years without possibility of parole
Interesting, I didn’t know that, though I didn’t follow the case too closely, but the arrest was big news
He referred to the prosecutors as scum and said they were the ones who were persecuting him like it was some purely political shit when he is an incredibly prolific fraudsters, rapist, and traitor. He should have been arrested during the Jan 6th insurrection and never allowed free again.
His reasoning was that Ross was a libertarian and this is to honor the libertarian movement that supported him… dude! He labeled the fucking drug cartels terrorist organizations and Ross enabled so much drug trafficking it isn’t funny. How the fuck do people not see through that?
Here’s my convoluted conspiracy theory for how this makes sense.
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Trump launches Trump Coin
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Trump pardons crypto drug dealer, but not paper drug dealers
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Crypto market booms
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Trump sells coin to whichever idiots he hasn’t scammed yet
That cryptoscan was to allow untraceable bribes from enemy nations.
I also think this is some crypto bro shenanigans. Ulbricht might even have billions in Bitcoin stashed away somewhere for a juicy payback.
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This is a win for drug cartels
Probably made a deal and wants all his Bitcoin. Smart kid, you know it’s hidden somewhere. Thank God he’s out there double life without parole. It’s inhumane.
Not to mention that undercover basically set him up to look bad.
If he didn’t wanna look bad he shouldn’t have sent a person he believed to be a hitman $300,000 to murder someone.
He was never charged or convicted of those charges, he’s innocent of that.
Well, you’re half correct. He was charged in Maryland for attempted witness murder, but the charges were dropped once he’d been sentenced so harshly in New York. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, and there’s plenty of conspiratorial debate about them.
I strongly doubt that the prosecution would have brought the charges if they didn’t have traceable evidence (through blockchain transaction records, undercover police chat logs, and data seizure) that coins, sent to an undercover agent for the purposes of murder, originated from wallets that were owned by Ulbricht. You can read more about one of the employees Ulbricht allegedly tried to have murdered (Curtis Green, who was sentenced for his own crimes) here and here.
You’re right, though, he’s technically innocent as the charges were dismissed. Perhaps it was all a huge setup/honeypot but the truth of whether or not he sent the coins should be discoverable with enough due diligence scouring the blockchain records. Intent matters, even though it didn’t end up getting tried in this instance.
🙂
You’re right, I should’ve said never convicted. There’s a ton of conspiracies around it all, was he actually the first Dread Pirate Roberts or was it actually a title passed down? At the time everyone was saying parallel construction but in hindsight he was probably just sloppy. It was a really exciting time.
How was he set up to look bad?
People can watch his wallets right? And they suspect/know what ones they are? And this is something people are hotly following now?
I should look this up. It’s fascinating if we can just watch it happen, on the chain.
Can’t watch Monero. Which is what he should have been using instead of Bitcoin.
Yeah, he really should have set that up before he went to prison, you know, before Monero existed, lol.
Ok. But Bitcoin didn’t suddenly become transparent the moment Monero was created.
Uh…okay then?
It’s so easy to see who bough his bitcoin “scam” now, isn’t it?
You think Ross did from prison?
Absolutely I do.
Of course they do. This is how they cope with anything Trump related. They come up with conspiracy theories.
You can’t see Trump is for sale?
I never said he wasn’t. If I had the cash I would ask for favors too.
Then why would you think this is a conspiracy theory?
I don’t think that Ulbricht had the capability to bribe Trump. I think that Lemmy and Reddit users are trying to justify Trump’s pardon by saying it was done through illegal activity (bribery) instead of campaign promises. That’s why I say they are making up conspiracy theories. Now I believe he can be bribed because of all the felonies he got from issuing bribes.
Gotcha, I still think he got paid for this because Ross was in for hiring a hitman which is an odd thing for Trump to pardon.
Kodak black paid 2mil for a pardon the first time. This is highly likely to be true, you are either uniformed, a bot, or in on the grift.
- How did he pay all that money while in prison?
- Where are you getting your facts about Ross from besides your ass?
Lawyers or anyone that has power of attorney can make payments on your behalf. How do you think people pay mortgages or make payments in jail?
That is literally NOT the definition of a lawyer.
I never said it was. I specified who can make payments for you while you are serving time. The fact you think this can’t happen or that the prison has any involvement in this is really off
edit: It should say Lawyers OR not ir perhaps that’s the confusion?
How does being in prison prohibit moving around assets?
This is incredibly stupid. Prison officials will do everything they can to prevent an inmate from moving around assets for VERY OBVIOUS reasons. But, after thinking about it, it may not be so obvious for this echo chamber so let me explain the obvious.
You are an inmate in prison. You made millions doing your illegal thing while free but you hare now doing hard time. You don’t like hard time, you want easy or no time. How do you make your life better while in prison. Wait, you have millions. You’ll just use that money to have your way with the guards and prison system. Guard giving you trouble? Use your assets that you’ve amassed to “get rid of them”.
The prison system has protocols and processes in place to prevent all inmates from being able to control any assets they have on the outside. This prevents them from committing further crimes, exerting influence, or running an enterprise (criminal or legal) while incarcerated.
Wardens do not have access to financial of prisoners. Why would you think that would be the case?
Again, I’m gonna suggest you look up lawyers and what they do.
Here’s some resources:
Lawyer (children’s edition)
Revocable Living Trust (apologies, but this one isn’t very kid friendly)
How prisons work (children’s edition)
Ross was an idiot, that’s why he was caught. They seized all his remaining bitcoin, what hadn’t been stolen by hackers because, again, he was an idiot and the Silk Road was slapped together from code cobbled from other places. There’s no way the dude was smart enough to set some aside for bribes in case he got caught, because he was so sure he wouldn’t that he advertised the Silk Road using his personal email with his real name in forum posts.
While I don’t think he deserved life in prison, he sure as hell ended up there because of how ridiculously idiotic he was. The dude isn’t smart enough to be a manager at Arby’s, let alone run a criminal enterprise.
isn’t smart enough to be a manager at Arby’s
Hey buddy, chill, there’s almost certainly talented doctors from other countries who couldn’t afford to recertify managing at least 2 Arby’s…and those will be the only 2 you don’t get food poisoning from.
That is completely missing my point. I’m sure there’s literal rocket scientists who have had to work at Arby’s to make ends meet, but that has nothing to do with Ross lacking the intellect to properly manage one. We’re not talking about immigrant doctors in this thread.
Sure, or you can read my comment again and realise the joke I was making.
they didn’t catch him because of bad opsec, unless you consider Tor to be bad opsec. they caught him with a parallel reconstruction after the NSA illegally spied on him.
change my mind
Don’t know or care about this guy but all drugs should be legal.
Then you should probably care about him. He gave people around the world access to medicine that was illegal
Silk Road wasn’t the first darknet market ya know. I helped launch the first couple that were .onion prior to Ross, but the movement has been about since the 90s at least and would’ve happened without any of us. We were working on a decentralised version that would’ve been unstoppable but people moved on and got other priorities when SR took all the media attention and spotlight. I’m guessing it’ll emerge out crypto soon now the tech has caught up with the theory.
I’m kind of curious to hear about this decentralized solution…
I lost touch with the guy who was working on it, but this was before smart contracts even came on the scene.
The original text that radicalised me; https://anarplex.sirion.io/hosted/files/Toward_A_Private_Digital_Economy/index.html
There was OpenBazaar, but flopped for obvious reasons.
Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her he would pardon her son “in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
Wildy transactional.
So… does “full and unconditional” mean he’s also pardoned for the murders-for-hire? Or just for being a drug lord and America’s Next Top Website Boy?
He was never convicted on murders for hire, charges were dropped
Yeah, it’s insane that he’s just openly being like, “I promise to use the powers of my office to solely benefit myself,” and the Supreme Court’s just like, “Get it, grrrrrl”
Although, to be fair, it did also benefit a guy who tried to murder five people.
I’m actually kind of impressed he kept his word. That’s unexpected
His part is signing a piece of paper with a Sharpie that one of his handlers puts in front of him. That phone call had to be horrible, Trump trying to explain to a mom he is setting her son that he knows nothing about, free because he once said he would to a large group of people he wants to grift.
Because 0% he knows the guy’s name, who he was, or why he was in prison.
Edit - autocorrect =(
I mean, I’m just going to go with the most obvious grift. Ulbricht is going to go right back to operating a crypto street pharmacy. Hell, he’ll do it on the open web now. He’ll call it “The New Silk Road” or similar.
And then there’s an agreement for the feds to not go after them. In exchange, Ulbricht uses a good portion of his earnings to become the largest single investor in Trumpcoin ever. If asked, the feds can either ignore the question or hide behind some fig leaf excuse they come up with.
It’s not like Trump didn’t run blatant undeniable cons in the last administration.
Having something like that as a government honeypot is also a great way to get kompromat on people.
Trump is a demon, but this was a good call. His sentence was wildly disproportionate to what he did.
Didn’t he try to hire a hitman?
No. The evidence against him was fabricated because they didn’t have any evidence.
I somehpw doubt that considering some if the evidence used to convict him was used to convict his DEA mole later
The judicial system in America is obviously not about what is written in their legal statutes or the veracity of the evidence presented. Otherwise war criminals, fraudsters and rapists like Bush, Cheney, Trump and Clinton would be in prison. It is about advancing an agenda for a white male US hegemony and that explains most of the outcomes, e.g. black people being enslaved in prison. Ulbricht thumbed his nose at the establishment and they got pissy. Assange and Snowden revealed their crimes and they hunted them to the ends of the earth. The CIA and their stooges, the Swedes, fabricated a rape allegation against Assange that was quietly dismissed, unfulfilled, seven years later. This establishment will stop at nothing to assert their authority and you wonder about evidence in the Ulbricht case?
No I don’t wonder because again that evidence was used to convict the DEA agents that stole from Silk Road. You are linking a bunch of things that have nothing to do with each other. The pattern you are seeing is an illusion
Nonetheless, he was not convicted on those charges.
it was to kill competition who were threatening to kill him. id say if the law won’t protect you, you are free to protect yourself
Edit: I wrote a whole comment about this and the corrupt DEA agents involved in pushing him into a murder-for-hire scheme who were also working as moderators for the Silk Road, and later went to prison for crimes surrounding the ordeal.
But I decided against it, because the fact remains that it is likely he did attempt to have people killed. It was due to threats of exposing him, not threats on his life. And the fact is that him likely being entrapped is a good legal defense but not a good moral one.
If we ignore everything involving the possible contract murder deals, I say that his release is wonderful. Considering he was never convicted of any of the murder for hire stuff, his sentence was draconian, and marked a real shift in the freedom of the internet. As to Trump, even a broken clock is right twice every 78 years.
But this release is not so sweet knowing what Ross may have and likely tried to do in order to hang onto his crumbling empire.
Could prosecutors still charge him with murder for hire, ultimately forcing Trump to double down?
I really don’t know, but I doubt they would. It’s possible for the original 5 instances he was accused of, as he was never tried but the district court conceded he probably did it.
The 6th, later and more famous instance? Probably not. He was actually indicted for that in Maryland, but it was a weak case that was dropped once he was convicted of his other drug and financial crimes. In the later incident, the hitman who he purportedly hired was Carl Force; the corrupt DEA agent. At best, Force’s action constituted entrapment. At worst, the whole story is unreliable. Either way, I can’t see any government agency thrilled about dragging the details of that situation out of obscurity.
even a broken clock is right twice a day…
this was probably timed to distract from the whole, nazi salute controversy.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
He called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”
I clearly recall Trump being president from 2016-2020, Ulbricht was sentenced to life without parole in 2015.
If it was so ridiculous, why didn’t he pardon him on his first term? What changed to make it such an immediate priority now?
Because he needed the libertarian vote this time in order to win. Its a very cheap promise that guarantees votes and doesnt alienate anyone that doesnt care. Honestly, the fact that he followed through suprises me.
“But why didnt he need the libertarian vote in 16?”
Because he never intended to win the first time. The first run was a fluke. He wanted to play victim and run the media circuit for profit.
Back then he thought Bitcoin was bad and a scam. This time someone showed him how to make money by creating a scam coin and doing a pump and dump, so now he’s pro Bitcoin. So pro he’ll get rid of all regulation so pump and dump scams are completely legal.
Imagine how many times he was asked:
“Why don’t you have your own “Bitcoin” coin yet, Mr. President?”
Trump doesn’t need to think about re-election this time around so he has more political freedom.
I remember this guy being a fucking idiot that paid for several fake assassinations of fake rivals. It was pretty funny.
It is funny in hindsight, knowing the assassinations were a scam. But he thought they were real, he talked in great detail about them and payed for them. This is missing from the article, I believe it was part of his indictment.
Oh yeah, he’s a piece of shit for sure. I just think it’s funny that he’s also a moron. What kind of drug lord gets a message saying “Hey, I heard of a guy who wants to take you down, wire me a cool mil and I’ll kill him for you, k?” and just… sends the money? More than once?! He definitely tried to rescue an overthrown Nigerian prince as a kid.
Don’t forget, he was caught because he posted his email in a public forum while advertising the Silk Road. That email address contained his real name.
lol I totally forgot about that. He should be used as evidence that meritocracy isn’t real.
Honestly, the only reason he’s famous at all is because the Silk Road was used to drum up shock by the media, so the government used him as an example to those who would make them look bad. Otherwise, he would have faded into obscurity like every other idiot criminal who stumbled into short term riches.
Don’t forget, he was caught because he posted his email in a public forum while advertising the Silk Road
Even better, he asked a question on StackOverflow lol
Don’t you know? All the best darknet marketplaces are cobbled together from code strangers gave you on SO.
Yeah, when I watched a synopsis of the story, multiple alarm bells rang in my head midway through watching it. He’s so gullible for how rich he fucking was
So the twist that was that they were all the same person, didn’t even surprise me, you could see that it was a scam a mile away if you were paying attention
The scammer was pretty good, though, I will give them that. Too bad the scammer was also pretty dumb about how the handle the money after the fact, and got caught lmao.
Tough on drugs… For people who aren’t white
Someone should really convince him to legalise all drugs to stick it to the cartels.
Wow that brings me joy. Silkroad is where I bought my first drugs
