Yes but no. All you would have had was a captcha image, you have no way of knowing it was the Silk Road captcha image. If you scan the internet, you will find

Yes but no. All you would have had was a captcha image, you have no way of knowing it was the Silk Road captcha image. If you scan the internet, you will find millions of captcha images. The FBI went the other way: they had the SR login page with an an unknown non-TOR IP address and asked "what is at this IP address?" Since it was a captcha image, and captcha images have to be sourced by the web site that is doing the captcha verification, it strongly implied the IP address was the SR server. As it turned out, it was. As a co-worker said, "When you live in an egg shell, small cracks are deadly."