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It'd be nice to read something about Silk Road written by someone who isn't a drug war fanboy. It gets annoying to read all the paternalistic and contemptuous b
by zkms 10y ago
It'd be nice to read something about Silk Road written by someone who isn't a drug war fanboy. It gets annoying to read all the paternalistic and contemptuous banter that the author fires off at anyone who dares defy his fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology:
> college-aged line of argumentation
> precocious and edgy libertarian.
> that he had been held accountable for his decision to destroy other people’s lives in order to protect his business, rather than being able to look the other way, as so many successful tech C.E.O.’s do
> If there was one thing that stood out, it was Ulbricht’s inability to see how his creation was being used for evil, even when he was the one committing the sin
> In the Age of Trump, Silicon Valley’s job is no longer to move fast and break things. Instead, it is to consider how its technologies can be used for horrendous evil. Sadly, Ross Ulbricht didn’t learn this until he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
- tptacek 10y agoI don't think "drug war fanboy" is a reasonable inference to draw from this, and I don't perceive any of the support for prohibition that you do.
- cortesoft 10y agoYeah, I am pretty sure the 'evil' the article is talking about is the hiring of hitman to kill people. I am pretty sure we can all agree that is bad.
- XorNot 10y agoYeah everyone who "has an issue" with coverage of Silk Road or the treatment of Ulbricht seems disturbingly eager to gloss over him trying to have people killed.
- 55555 10y agoThere are some people who remain open to the possibility that he never actually believed that people were being assassinated. It seemed to me that the whole assassination thing was a barely believable backstory used for a shakedown. Ulbricht conceivably paid the ransom to prevent the leak of user data, knowing full well that nobody was being killed. I came to this conclusion after reading a lot about this story; not just headlines (I did not read this article however). I'm just explaining that many people are not just "glossing over" that. But who knows what really happened. In the event that he thought someone really was being killed, it doesn't detract from the motivations he had in the beginning. Power corrupts, he created a monster, etc.
- tptacek 10y agoI know I can't write a comment that will settle this particular controversy but I feel compelled to point out that it's only on an internet message board that someone could believe that an elaborate shakedown involving the creation a record of having ordered and verified multiple assassinations, a shakedown in which your eventual vindication depends on a favorable account from the person shaking you down, is the less likely explanation of events than someone simply ordering someone's assassination --- which, if you follow the news, is something that happens all the time, and something that almost always has this exact outcome. This particular debate reminds me of the epistemological certainty people had about Hans Reiser's serial killer friend, and the notion that the police were fixated on Reiser and not the serial killer because they were put off by nerds.
- zkms 10y agoI don't gloss over it, but like I explained here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073, he was never formally charged nor convicted of it, there were multiple federal agents (Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV) whose corruptness was intimately involved with the hitmen incident, and finally, violence in the drugs trade is a product of prohibition, not one inherent to darknet drug markets or the drug trade in general. Tbh after this nonsense happened I'm utterly sure that everyone involved in darknet markets firmly avoids doing anything involving hitmen anyway, given how literally every so-called "hitman" online is either a fed, a scammer, or a corrupt fed.
- tptacek 10y agoIt's not true that he was never formally charged with it. It was a factual element of his conspiracy charge; it was brought into the case in such a way that not only did the defense have the opportunity to rebut it, but, because it was one of the legs of the primary charge in the case, the obligation to do so.
- zkms 10y agoAh! I stand corrected; I take back all I said about the murder-for-hire stuff.
- XorNot 10y agoAh yes, always good to know that what keeps these self-described freedom crusaders from having people murdered is that they might get caught, not you know, the idea that it's wrong.
- MichaelGG 10y agoThough wasn't that because the targeted person was threatening to harm thousands of other people? Edit: Nevermind, this is one of the other hits. I was thinking of the "Chemist" one. Certainly killing the guy over money isn't right.
- throwaway287391 10y agoThen could you please explain how you interpret the phrasing "college-aged line of argumentation" used to describe the arguments against prohibition? I don't see any reason to say "college-aged" other than to casually dismiss these arguments as being childish (without actually having the courage to argue the opposite side).
- tptacek 10y agoHis arguments can be childish and their implications still correct. The strength of an argument is orthogonal to its consequences. It's easy to formulate a bad argument for a valid idea. I don't know how many more ways to say that I can come up with.
- zkms 10y agoThe author literally gloats that Ulbricht will never live outside a concrete box, as due punishment ("he had been held accountable") for the sole "sin" (his word, not mine) of creating a drug marketplace. There is no mention that the internet hitmen saga is a predictable and avoidable negative effect of prohibition (having to resolve disputes by extrajudicial violence instead of having access to lawyers/courts/arbitration), there's no mention that none of the murders-for-hire had actually been done (every internet hitman is a fed and/or scammer) and he, AFAICT, hasn't even been convicted of the procuring murder charges.
- tptacek 10y agoThe article makes fun of the fact that the murders didn't take place, and were instead faked using canned food. I think you're reading into this a bit. (As I said upthread: you're incorrect about him never being confronted with the murder allegation in court).
- rsynnott 10y agoI mean, they were selling fentanyl. You don't have to be some sort of hard-line prohibitionist to think that making your living selling fentanyl to kids over the Internet is not in society's best interest.
- mirimir 10y agoOK, so I don't know the specifics. But the major problem with fentanyl is thinking that you're buying heroin, or some other weaker opiate, or another drug entirely. If the seller is honest about what they're selling, and clearly discusses safe dosages, fentanyl arguably isn't especially dangerous.
- DanBC 10y agoFentanyl is also dangerous because the lethal dose is close to the recreational dose so even knowing the purity and doses is risky.
- mirimir 10y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case. I find that the therapeutic index is ~270, vs ~70 for morphine and ~25 for heroin. The potency, however, is dramatically greater. So I would expect that dealers would cut it enough that easily measurable dosages would be required. It is notoriously hard to uniformly cut drugs as potent as fentanyl or LSD, I admit.
- DanBC 10y agoAh, thanks for this. The last bit of research I know about cutting agents is quite old now. http://www.cph.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cut-a-guide-to-the-adulterants-bulking-agents-and-other-contaminants-found-in-illicit-drugs.pdf http://www.cph.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cut-a-guide... That only has a couple of mentions of fentanyl, and seems to suggest that fentanyl is found in stuff that's sold as heroin.
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- olieidel 10y agoWired has quite a long piece on Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht [1], definitely a good read. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/
- mirimir 10y agoI've read other Wired coverage that was decent, but this article is horrible. > Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google. That's not true. I've had a few onions that Google indexed, via various tor2web proxies. > To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. OK, that's technically correct. But why not just say "Tor"? > Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, ... It wasn't anonymous, because you had to create an account, associate it with a Bitcoin address, and provide a mailing address to sellers. And Bitcoin payments are not at all "traceless", unless you mix adequately and use Tor.
- gotothedoctor 10y agoI am often critical of Nick Bilton's opinions, but he is not a "drug war fanboy" by any stretch of the imagination; nor does he have a "fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology." If Silk Road did not facilitate the sale of drugs at all, but still enabled the sale of guns, murder for hire, poison, weapons, child porn, would anyone defend it, at all?
- yock 10y agoI'd defend the sale of anything which doesn't inherently infringe on the rights of others. A couple of the items on your list fit that category, others don't. The issue here is what reasoning we use to prohibit a thing, and when those reasons extend to attempting to prevent harms we tend to have problems.
- zkms 10y agoThe production or use of {murder-for-hire, weapons, poisons, child abuse imagery} all involve grave and inherent harm -- regardless of the laws that regulate/prohibit them. The harm that drug use/manufacture causes is a lot more a function of the relevant policies/laws than the actual chemicals themselves. Indeed, most of the harm from illicit drug use comes from: 1. dose/concentration uncertainty or potential contamination with higher-potency drugs -- like unexpected fentanyl inside heroin 2. contamination with unwanted or dangerous chemicals (from manufacturing / distribution processes) -- such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP or cutting agents 3. Poly-drug use: combining any two of {opioids, benzos, alcohol} to exploit synergistic effects -- which can easily result in respiratory depression 4. Designer drugs / research chemicals -- the result of someone trying to make a drug that works on a given neurobiological target but without the result being similar enough to the molecules on a Controlled Substances list. The problem lies in the fact that many drugs with long histories of human use (opium, marijuana) have long histories of human use, and so they've been tested extensively and are known not to produce horrid adverse effects. It is hard to replicate the effects of a compound that has been selected and tested for efficacy and safety -- while being forced to make significant changes to the molecule. Examples of that include synthetic cannabinoids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids), which are a lot more dangerous than actual marijuana. All of these are either caused or significantly worsened by prohibition and can be much more readily avoided without prohibition. Those harms are not inherent to drug use; indeed, people who have adequate access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids can safely use them for decades without any major medical complications.
- wutbrodo 10y agoSeriously, this is one of the worst written articles I've read in a while (though I gather that it's an excerpt from a book: it's also worse than any book I've read in a while).