On Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 10:12 PM David Barrett
   <[1]dbarrett@expensify.com> wrote:

   On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 6:08 PM Karl <[2]gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:

   My understanding is the crime is *attempting* to have someone killed,
   whether or not it's carried out.  Everything seems to suggest he
   felt Blake Krokoff was a real person, and wanted him killed, and was
   offering payment to do so.  Thankfully whoever "Blake Krokoff" actually
   is did a good job covering his tracks, but there's no reason to think
   that Ulbricht didn't genuinely want him dead.

   ... except that ulbricht was sentenced to longer than life, and his
   site would have had to have been compromised to find him, so it's
   highly possible the evidence was planted by whoever didn't like him.

   Well yes, this is what we have courts for: to investigate this.  And
   unless you feel he had an incompetent lawyer, that's the job of his
   counsel to defend him.
   I'm just saying that the chat log was evidence that he made a genuine
   attempt to hire a killer to murder someone he believed he knew the
   identity of.  However, if you are willing to basically throw out all
   evidence you are suspicious of *without evidence it's fake*, then you
   can sorta believe anything.  But clearly you aren't advocating that our
   court system just consult your personal judgement on what is valid
   evidence?

   I'm sure the court reviewed evidence to the extent that lawyers pushed
   it to.
   One of my friends had her dog stolen by an ex.  She actually took the
   ex to court, and in court the ex testified that the dog had always been
   hers.  The case failed, and the thief kept the dog.
   Courts aren't perfect.  But something is up when somebody is serving
   longer than life for nonviolent crimes.  Nobody dies from asking to
   hire a killer.
   I don't give weight to circumstantial evidence in political conflicts.
   Charge people for the reason you're hunting them so everybody can know
   what's going on.
   But honestly I know little about the ulbricht case.  I have stronger
   opinions in things I know about.

   To be clear here, the person in prison did not sell narcotics, right?
   They provided a platform for general trade, where others sold
   narcotics.

   He profited from them by taking a transaction fee, so yes, he was
   selling narcotics in every legal, moral, and semantic sense.

   That's not the meaning of "selling" in an online anonymous marketplace,
   to me.  You have different experience?

   I think it's pretty common to say "Amazon sells stuff", in the same way
   that "Silk Road sells stuff".  If Amazon started selling hard
   narcotics, and Jeff Bezos had a chat log of trying to solicit the
   assassination of someone, surely you wouldn't come to his defense?
   Regardless, this sounds like a

   Amazon is practically a monopoly.  Jeff Bezos needs to be kept in line
   because with that amount of money you can buy ten times the lawyers
   prosecuting you, to defend you.

   semantic debate.  From a legal perspective, do you agree that online
   stores do in fact sell things, and are liable for the products they
   sell?  If nothing else: the fact that Ulbricht

   If Ulbricht had made silk road open source and decentralised, we would
   never have never had this conversation.

   was arrested for the sale of hard narcotics on his website *should be
   proof he was liable*, tautologically so.
   (Fun fact: did you know that grocery stores just rent out shelf space
   to vendors, the physical equivalent of Amazon / Silk Road?  So even in
   the physical world, stores are just marketplaces for a wide variety of
   vendors to sell products side by side on the shelf.)

   You can actually buy illegal stuff on Amazon.  The key is to get it
   delivered before the seller is shut down.
   Amazon was given an opportunity to implement policies in its software,
   to keep itself out of prison.  Keeps everyone able to get their
   groceries.

   I find it frustrating that you seem wholly willing to defend the theory
   of our government, but then completely disregard every practical
   implementation of that theory.  You cannot seriously believe that
   justice would be better served if we had a process that applied your
   nonexistent level of rigor to evidence gathering and legal proceedings.

   We're just bantering, man.  I've seen posts here in support of
   ulbricht, and silk road and cryptocurrency helped people talk about
   things that were hard to discuss before them.  I'm creatively looking
   for ways to make points, just as you appear to be doing as well.
   A democracy is defined by being in flux.  It is incredibly important
   that we disagree with it, so we can figure out how to change it.

   -david

References

   1. mailto:dbarrett@expensify.com
   2. mailto:gmkarl@gmail.com