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silkroad

»www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24371894

So the surprise to me is it took the FBI this long to worm their way to the guy operating the site out of free wifi near his house in san fran.

Reading the indictment he made so many mistakes. His servers got imaged under his nose thanks to "international legal agreements", he posted questions on TOR/PHP integration under his name to stackexchange, he got hoodwinked into ordering a "hit" on someone and paying for it. He had a google plus and gmail account under his name. He ordered fake IDs with his picture on them, and had to talk (well, clam up) to homeland security when they got intercepted.

There has to be a hollywood film made about this:

»www.scribd.com/doc/172766650/Cri···Ulbricht

his google plus page:

»plus.google.com/101844174649242995101/posts

Maintaining true anonymity is a tricky business with a high profile site. I doubt he expected it to be the huge success it became.

I also expect book and movie deals, but assume he'll be spending quite a few years behind bars before he gets to enjoy the proceeds.

EDIT:

You can see how this is affecting Silk Road users on reddit - »www.reddit.com/r/silkroad

I expect they will throw away the key. Attempted murder? he'll get life. They seized what was in escrow, in the site accounts, but clearly he made 10s of millions at least @ the current btc value.

With the difficulty converting btc back to cash in large quantities it could all still be in bitcoins sitting on a thumbdrive somewhere, waiting for someone who knows the key. Like shawshank redemption maybe he will get out at 65 and go to a tree in a field somewhere. Assuming the crypto currency survives till then.

I think this will remove a lot of the attraction of Bitcoin.

Takes out one major place to use it.

I'm not sure, they've taken out one guy pretty effectively but the vendors, the customers, and the currency is still online. There are competing sites following the same model. This will boost the competition one of which will step up to fill the gap.

As I read somewhere: napster shuttered! the end of pirating, no, not by a long shot.

Silk Road busted with help of mysterious package from Canada