On 02/07/2015 09:13 PM, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
> This has been an interesting dialogue.
>
> I see some parallels with the Siege of Julian Assange. Ross was
> never actually charged with planning murders just as Julian was
> never charged with rape but it was used to slander his name,
> creating a convenient story which cowardly people will cling to
> because it allows them to beat back the guilt at having never done
> anything audacious in their own lives. Loud cowards were out in
> force after Snowden leaked NSA documents too.
>

+1

It is not a matter of individual conscious acts within a government
agency, in my opinion. It is some vast unconscious force within
society that gets unleashed when the status quo is challenged: the
outsider must be killed - not literally, but morally and
reputationally. The status quo must maintain the illusion that it is
superior to people who act outside its laws. The facts take second
place to that.

I would go further though and say that in either of two scenarios:
((1) Ulbricht contracted hits (2) he didn't), his mistake was to fail
to do what Satoshi did: decentralise the architecture. Whether one
also has to have proper anonymity is a difficult question; we have
Zimmerman and Satoshi as two different opposing examples for that.

But with decentralization in place, calling for hits is not needed and
not effective. Not that violence couldn't occur between market
participants (unless maybe we get TOR for postal service up and
running - in any case that problem seems somewhat soluble), but
without a central store of funds and admin rights, it would always be
an edge effect, not a bomb blowing up the system.

So good luck to everyone involved in Open Bazaar, Dark Wallet and
basically anyone trying to make decentralised crypto markets a reality.