Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] He never stole from anyone. He was a first time offender. He was never convicted of any violent crime. He ran a website. He wasn't even a vendor delivering actual drugs to people on the website. The overwhelming majority of what was traded on the Silk Road was small amounts of weed and minor drugs, guns, cp all violent or fraud related products were strictly prohibited on the website. It is very likely and there is evidence to suggest that he may no longer have been directly involved with the site and he clearly explained his reasoning and his strong principles of freedom that it would be a peaceful, non violent place for voluntary trade.
[00:00:51] Ross Ulbricht received a double life sentence plus 40 years and after 12 years in prison today he is free.
[00:01:05] It's time for a Guy's Take Episode the Best in Bitcoin Made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible Foreign what is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. I want you to check out the Bitkit Lightning and on chain non custodial. This is a self sovereign wallet and it is a fantastic one and it's one that I've used for quite some time and I am really excited to see what they are doing as they shift things over to pubkey which we just had an episode about Pub Key recently if you want to understand what that is and what that's about. Links and details for that will be in the show notes and then also don't forget to get your Jade plus if you have not yet and I have a 10% discount for you right down in the show notes link plus code guy gets you 10% off and also it's a great way to support the show to let them know that I sent you there. I just got mine and I literally just paused working on a video about it in order to stop and do this episode. Now I actually want to start this off with a really short article. It doesn't quite classify as read because it's like I said it's really short but a really short article which is a take from Aaron von Werdem. And then I'm also going to read a short tweet from Vijayboy Potty at the very end of this that I think does a good job of kind of rounding up the perspective from early bitcoiners and why this story, why everything that happened here is so important to the bitcoiners who have been around for a long time now. I thought now that he is finally free that Trump has given him a full pardon, by the way, not even commuting his sentence. So he's, he is an innocent man now walking free. He has no, you know, nothing on his record in relation to this. But because this is coming up again, I kind of thought we would be putting this behind us now. But now everybody is trying to. Everybody who's excusing or I guess just doesn't like that Trump has made any sort of decision are yet again trying to destroy his character and justify the fact that he should be in prison for the rest of his life based on the murder for hire allegations that the media ran wild with and that he was not convicted of and had nothing to do with his trial. And a post where I just laid out some of the details that most people don't know about the case kind of got a little bit of attention and people started reposting it. And then I had, I don't know, a handful of people message me privately and be like, do you have details on this? And so I felt like, okay, it's time to go back into this, to pull a bunch of the stuff together that I have saved over the years and my previous deep dives into this topic, into the Ross Ulbricht case. And so I tried to pull together a bunch of the bullet points that most people don't know and lay out some extremely important things as to that led to Ross getting an extremely unfair trial. And understand this is not a comprehensive discussion. I am going to specifically focus on the things that most people just don't hear about and why tons of evidence against him should be considered extremely suspect at best. And then rounded out with a lot of my own thoughts on this and my gratitude that Lyn can finally get some peace and Ross can get a second chance, which I think he very much deserves. And we'll actually go ahead and just start this off with a short take from Aaron Von Rodham that's posted on Bitcoin Magazine.
[00:05:05] Donald Trump did the right thing by freeing Ross Ulbricht By Aaron Von Werdem Technically, Donald Trump broke his campaign promise by not freeing Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on day one of his presidency. No, Inauguration Day is not day zero. But as I explained in my previous take, I wasn't expecting a literal first day pardon. Anyways, even day two exceeds my expectations. Trump delivered, and I'm very glad he did. When I first heard about Silk road in early 2013, I was immediately intrigued by the concept of buying and selling drugs anonymously online. To this day I think darknet markets are the best intermediary step before the war on drugs is ended. It removes dealers from street corners while providing users some level of quality assurance that through a public rating system.
[00:06:00] Discovering Silk Road was also how I first learned about Bitcoin. I started writing about the digital currency a few months later and am still at it today. In a way, I owe my career to Ulbricht. That Ulbricht was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison was a miscarriage of justice in my view. Even if you believe he is guilty of everything he's been convicted of, all nonviolent crimes, over a decade behind bars, should be long enough to be sure. I don't believe Trump actually cares about Ulbricht. He could have freed him during his first term if that was the case. And Trump certainly has no intent of ending the war on drugs. If anything, he's about to escalate it by designating cartels to be terrorist organizations and imposing the death penalty on drug dealers. Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht because that would benefit him politically. But to his credit, he kept his word. Ross is finally free. Well done, President Trump and everyone else who helped make this happen.
[00:07:03] All right, since all the old allegations and all the smearing and painting of Ross as evil have basically come back out of the woodworks like a bunch of termites that you swear you got rid of, and a whole bunch of ignorant people are stating things very confidently that have unbelievably shaky at best foundations and outright an obviously fraudulent basis for anyone who still retains the ability to think clearly and do a little bit of investigation for themselves, as well as the prosecutors themselves, I might add, which is why it never saw the light of day. And they worked very hard to make sure none of the evidence or information around it got into the ears of the jurors. And we'll talk a little bit about why. So I had a tweet knocking out like a bunch of the bullet points on, especially specifically around the hitman for hire, the murder for hire claim. And it gained a little bit of attention. Some people were reposting it and then linking to me about it. So I was like, okay, I guess I'll. I guess I'll do this all over again because people are finding it valuable to share or have this in response to other people. So this take is going to be a lengthier rundown. And then I also think I'm going to do a two SATs, because I think it's important that this is digestible and that People can actually reference something easily. So keep an eye out on Twitter and Nostr for the details of that. If you want to have something to post. If you basically want me to do the work for you so that you don't have to go through all of the. The depositions and the affidavits and the indictments regarding this in order to find these things, I'm going to try to put together a short little video in maybe 5 minutes, 6 minutes, and sum all of this crap up. So the first thing is that there's a lot of inconsistencies in this situation. And there are also numerous pieces of evidence and testimony and conversations, and importantly, testimony not related to the trial. These are conversations that happened elsewhere or were in chat and online chats that occurred not related to the trial. So this is just stuff that was referenced before, that happened before the trial that ended up being related later. And a ton of it shows that many people, numerous people, at least four, maybe five, probably more, over the entire span, controlled the DPR account, the Dread Pirate Roberts account, which was the quote unquote, main admin of the Silk Road website. In fact, it's likely. It looks like the creation of DP of Dread Pirate Roberts was actually after Ross Ulbricht left. And it was when he handed it over to somebody else that the account became Dread Private Roberts, who, if you know the fictional character is handed down the moniker to other people. And so it would be the act of him handing over to somebody else that kind of created the meme. And it's like, oh, it's a Dread Pirate Roberts. And then it continued to exchange hands. But the.
[00:10:22] The roommate of Ross Ulbricht, who also was more technical because Russ Ulbricht did not have a technical background, he didn't understand how to run or deal with the website. His roommate says that he was only involved. He wasn't even involved for a full year. It was somewhere around November, December of 2011 in which he pulled back and handed the reins over to somebody else. And specifically the person that he handed the reins over to was someone that came to him on the website because they found a major critical vulnerability and he was giving him information on how to fix it. And so they started working together and they've been talking for some time and then finally they exchanged the account over and Ross Ulbricht basically washed his hands of the entire thing. And then when Silk Road came back up in conversation like a year later or so, there is a chat log where he sends him a message about it and they're talking about it. And Ross Ulbricht specifically says, oh my God, I'm so happy that this is not my problem anymore. And his friend responds, yeah, no kidding. Then there is also one of the previous Silk Road admins who had worked with Ross, didn't know it was Ross, but he had worked with the, you know, the main account, the head account on the website. And while they were working together and out of, you know, just being cautious, they actually created a quote, unquote secret handshake where he would ask him the handshake was I would, the admin would ask him for a book recommendation and then he would recommend Rothbard. And this was his way of knowing that he is talking to the same person. This admin both testified and had logs showing that he attempted to prove that he was talking to the same person in the DPR account at a later date. And the guy not only did not know about previous conversations that they had or events that had unfolded, but he also tried the secret handshake and failed that handshake. And again, this wasn't related to like, you know, a police officer is reaching out and like he has to be suspicious or anything. This was just the admin trying to talk to the DPR account and him realizing at this date that it was no longer the person he had been talking to previously. And Amir Taqi, who also was a developer and involved in that and had conversations with DPR, specifically said toward late 20 about talking with DPR again in late 2012 and early 2013.
[00:12:53] I guess I'm. I'm a little bit wonky on exactly the time period. So I'm not sure if he's referencing this from 2011, but he says, quote, One year or two years later when I messaged DPR, I'm pretty certain it was not the same guy. The tone was completely different. He had no recollection of the events that had happened before. And his attitude to me was in stark contrast with to the exuberant and wordy Dread Pirate Roberts of the early days. Then there was also another reference from one of the pseudonymous Silk Road vendors who explicitly said there are at least two, if not three, people who are administering the Silk Road and run the DPR account. In addition, someone logged in to the DPR account and did stuff on the Silk Road website before it was shut down and while Ross was in solitary confinement. I mean, if that's not proof, what does proof look like? There were multiple people behind the DPR account. Even Curtis Green, who was an admin for A short time said that he had had access to the DPR account. He was DPR for a short time during some transition. He said he's sure it was at least a handful of people, but he honestly doesn't know if he was DPR at one point. The number of people, like they just have no idea how many people were actually had actually run that account during the past because all the convers were private, so they didn't know if somebody else had a conversation or somebody else did something and exchanged hands. And a lot of times conversations happened off the website so you wouldn't even have a record of it. And it was between clearly a number of different people. Now the lead investigator on the case who was explicitly trying to figure out who the Dread Pirate Roberts was, was pretty convinced that it was Mark Karpellis along with Ashley Barr. And these were the main people at the time running the Silk Road. Mark Karpeles, if you do not remember, was actually the guy who ran the fraud at Mount Gox. And it was discovered later that pretty much almost half of the transactions on Mt. Gox were actually related to Silk Road. So it would not be surprising at all that Mark had a deep tie to this. Plus Mark Karpelis, literally what he did was run websites. He did it tons. He built and ran tons and tons of different websites. He was making bookus of money off of the Silk Road. Everybody back then knew about the Silk Road and lead investigator had a lot of evidence to suggest that it was in fact Mark Karpeles. Now, Mark Karpeles was having secret conversations, having communications with one of the corrupt agents, which we will get back to, who had been extorting and robbing users of the Silk Road for Bitcoin actually. But he had been having a conversation with him and then met with federal prosecutors and Karpeles lawyers said they would give over the name of a different target instead of Karpelis in exchange for legal immunity. And very shortly thereafter, Ross Ulbricht was arrested. Now, 10 days before he was arrested again, the lead investigator on the case emailed his boss warning him that the other two admins, the people that he believed were actually running the Silk Road, were going to get away with it and addressed it again after Ross's arrest, stating that Karpelis and Ashley were going to get away and Karpelis was probably right now purging everything now that it had been released. And importantly, what Ross claimed happened was that through an old communications channel, the current DPR had messaged him and asked for help relating to the Silk Road and wanted him to come back and see something. And thus Ross went to a cafe and logged into the Silk Road. And the second he did, that's when the undercover agents seized his laptop and arrested him.
[00:16:57] Sounds a lot to me like Ross was the fall guy for the current people who were running the DPR account. Now, there is ample evidence and Ross even admits that he did in fact make the Silk Road and he did in fact run the Silk Road for its. For its early period. And a lot of what I just said was not allowed in court. I think the testimony of his friend who said. Who was told that he's glad it's not his problem anymore. Ross said he's glad it's not his problem anymore in like 20, late 2012, and then in November of 2011 said that he had handed it over to somebody else. That I believe was allowed. Most of the rest of what I just went through was not allowed in the trial. But honestly, the real miscarriage of justice in this case comes around Shawn Bridges and Carl Force, two corrupt agents who had been closely tied to the investigation, who had participated in the Silk Road like they had been on the website, who had access admin access to the website and were directly related to the chat logs of the murder for hire scheme, and who were both corrupt extorting users and stealing and laundering bitcoin from the site. So let's break down a lot of bullet points on this one. So when he was indicted, prosecutors claimed that he had hired a hitman and planned and executed murdering of six different people, and that this was used to paint him as an insanely dangerous person and thus preventing any chance for him to get bail. And of course, this was loudly and endlessly proclaimed through a media campaign smearing him as a evil, violent drug kingpin and a murderer. But of course, it didn't actually end up in his indictment. He was not charged for it and it was not. And he was never convicted of any of it. And the only murder for hire case that actually made it into an official indictment that stayed for a while was regarding Curtis Green, who was a previous admin for the Silk Road. And it was left untouched for years until it was finally just dismissed with prejudice in 2018, meaning it can't be refiled or considered against him again. And I think there's a very clear reason why this was left out of the trial, because it was would have presented a mountain of evidence as to why the government and all of the agents and tons of the data and information they presented was not reliable. So Curtis Green actually cooperated with the feds and the agents in this and actually had a meeting with Sean Bridges and Carl Force. These are the corrupt officers, the corrupt agents involved in this who were extorting and stealing from people, which again, we will get to in just a second. So they attended this and worked with Curtis Greene. And on January 25, Greene went through extensive detail on the admission, administrative privileges of the website, on the powers of the website and gave them admin access, showed how they could change passwords of users, change status from seller to vendor to buyer, etc. That they could reset their pins and basically do whatever they wanted. The very Same afternoon on January 25, there was a series of resetting of passwords and changing of pins to get into vendor accounts and then theft of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin. And all of the evidence pointed back to the admin account flush, which had been Curtis Green's account that made these changes. Now, the day after that there were communications between DPR and Forces, one of Forces many anonymous accounts. This one was Knob. That said all of the thefts were linked to Curtis Green's account account, the one of course, that Carl Force and Shawn Bridges just got access to and now had full admin privileges for. And then one of the third party accounts, the one of the vendor accounts that had received over 20,000 bitcoins during this entire thing from the vendors who were stolen from, had the username number 13. Then there was a separate email conversation at this exact same time where Force asked Bridges to send him a transfer of bitcoins to his account. So this is Force's account, Trust Us Jones on the Silk Road. And the same amount reference was transferred on the same day from account number 13 to trust us Jones, making it pretty clear that Bridges and Carl Force were the ones who committed the theft, had access to it, and then were transferring bitcoin to each other from Curtis Green's account, from the fake Vendors account. And that number 13 belonged to Sean Bridges and Trust Us Jones, belonged to Carl Force. In addition, there were actually numerous other accounts I don't think they've ever actually tallied and pulled them all together, but that were tied to Carl Force, that they knew who were trying to blackmail dpr, that were blackmailing and extorting other people on the website. These were, there was a Carla Sophia Death from above, a number 13, as I said, which was Shawn Bridges, there was the French Maid account, there was nob, and again, there were probably a lot more that never actually got figured Out. Then a few weeks after all of this took place, there were emails between Bridges and Force that were literally talking about how to. How you go about liquidating a ton of Bitcoin. And Sean Bridges immediately created an LLC called Quantum International Investments and opened up an account with Fidelity. Over the next few months, this account received nothing but wires from Mount Gox that totaled around a million dollars. Then, of course, we all know history happened and Mount Gox blew up. And a lot of this information started to slowly trickle out because the data in Mt. Gox was being released. And according to records, internal records with the police, Sean Bridges had actually been doing searches for filings under the Bank Secrecy act that either mentioned Carl Force or Sean Bridges or Quantum International Investments llc. And when they started showing up at the end of April, and then on May 2, an official investigation into Carl Force was submitted. And important. This is the beginning of an investigation. This was not made public. Force did not have access or should not have had access to this information at all. This was the beginning of an investigation. Two days later, Force just decided to resign his position of 15 years. Actually, Shawn Bridges tried to resign too. I think it was. I think it was like a half a year or maybe a year later that he finally threw in the towel. But there's actually a ton of other stuff around, criminal complaints for what Bridges and Force did during this time. Force actually Force had his Venmo account frozen and he faked a subpoena from the DEA and filed it against Venmo to unfreeze his account and give him funds. Funds again, tied to Mt. Gox and tied to the theft, along with a plethora of other extortionist occasions or situations that had played out on the Silk Road. But when Venmo said that they were going to like file it or, or ask officially from the dea, then he tried to work with someone from the IRS and another agent on the Baltimore task force to have Venmo's bank accounts seized. Not to mention, there's just a whole bunch of other crazy, shady, and potentially criminal activity that happened during this time. Like Forest, Carl Force actually worked with an exchange called COIN MKT and made it look like there was official documents relating to an account that had like $300,000 at Coin MKT and that the DEA said that they had to freeze the account and turn over the funds. And they just sent the funds to. And this was fraudulent. The Carl Forces, like supervisor or like the people above him did not even know that this happened. And they literally just coined Join MKT who he advised for and they let him put him on the website for the anti money laundering compliance officer who worked for the dea. And this was their big claim to fame, that they're so sophisticated they literally froze the account and then the quote unquote, the seizure was to move the funds directly. They ended up in Carl Force's personal account. So these guys were shady as shit. They had been doing stuff for a long time and making banks off of corrupting this entire investigation and changing and manipulating and blackmailing people all over the place. This had damn near been their job throughout this investigation. And they had admin access to change whatever the hell they wanted on the Silk Road. In addition, the murder for hire situation with the DPR account was with the. The account knob. And who was that? Carl Force. And so the evidence that the DPR account hired a hitman to murder Curtis Greene was a direct conversation with Carl Force. And Carl Force was conveniently the one hired to find the hitman and then proved that the kill took place. And in an interview, Curtis Green actually said that he went back through all of his chat logs and a bunch of stuff on the website and noticed that he said some of his previous chat logs had been edited. That his conversations, he said, I don't remember saying any of this and I don't remember any of this ever happening. And those specifically those edits that he is referring to are the ones that actually aligned with Carl Force's narrative, that Curtis Green was the one involved in all of this. And Greene literally said that it made it look like it aligned with Carl Force's murder for hire narrative. And he believes that because they had access, he suspected they had just altered the chat logs. And remember, Curtis Green is the supposed victim here who had cooperated with the officers. I would argue he not only has no incentive to lie, he has a lot of incentive to just let them do whatever they want because he was an administrator on the Silk Road. And remember, this could all literally have been at a time when Ross Ulbricht specifically was. Wasn't even directly involved with the site anymore. And all of the theft, the blackmail, the extortion, the direct murder for hire chat logs, the numerous accounts behind it, the murder for hire, hitman himself, were all direct. The situation, the theft, the conversations, the accounts, the bitcoin transactions were all directly tied to and all put in motion by Carl Force and Shawn Bridges. The entire situation was about the theft and the hack that Force and Bridges had committed. And they had administrative privileges to the website and the prosecutors Let this out just enough so that the media would run wild with it and paint Ross specifically, specifically as a crazed, murdering lunatic. And then dropped it all and had it sealed so none of this could be discussed at his trial. But guess what? Even though the indictment was thrown out, the prosecutors did get to bring up that he had committed murder for hire, even though the defense was not allowed to bring up Carl Force or Shawn Bridges because it was. It needed to be secret because there was still an ongoing investigation. It seems perfectly rational to me that one of the reasons why the prosecutors really did not want this information to get into the court case is because it literally suggested that people who were deeply tied to all of the data, information and chat logs and the conversations themselves, the actual accounts, were being controlled by people in the investigation who were criminals, who were committing fraud, who were stealing from people, who were blackmailing tons of people related to the entire situation, vendors on the website and trying to blackmail dpr. And I even forgot to mention during this that Shawn Bridges actually had to turn in his computers, two of his computers, for investigation, during this entire thing. And when he submitted them, he kind of accidentally, quote, unquote, submitted his Mac to the batch of devices that were actually supposed to be permanently wiped. And when he asked his boss to actually try to get access to something, he was caught trying to go to the computer that he was trying to get wiped to remove a folder titled bitstamp on it that actually held a ton of Bitcoin transactions and history that tied him to the theft and him and Carl Force to a bunch of money laundering and wire transfers from Mount Gox. There's very, very good reason to not trust a lot of the evidence coming from the federal agents. And you know who else doesn't believe it? Curtis Green, the supposed victim. He even has A tweet from 2017 says, quote, Ross Ulbricht got a raw deal. There is so much more to the Silk Road story than people know. And I can't yet talk about I don't believe Ross is dangerous or that it's in his character to order a hit on anyone. He should never have gotten that horrible sentence. And in the same interview where he talked about where he believed his chat logs had been edited, somebody had gotten on him about, like, you're supporting the guy who tried to kill you. And he says, he immediately snapped back and said, and how do you know that he tried to have me killed? You were literally just going by what the government tells you. And I don't believe it. And remember this, Carl Force and Shawn Bridges and almost all of what we just went through was not allowed to be used for defense at his trial.
[00:31:43] Now it clearly is true and Ross has absolutely admitted that he created the Silk Road website, that he ran it for at least some span of time and he explained thoroughly, actually, and even his reasons why he was trying to create a safe and non violent place for people to peacefully trade and not subject to any arbitrary government's laws. But a basic ethics of a website is necessarily a non violent thing. And in fact it was the least violent place to buy any amount of drugs. And there was a very, very strong case that it was a significant harm reduction to the, any, any amount of the drug market. The most, the overwhelming majority is like 80 to 90% of what was sold on the website was just small amounts of weed. Something that you can literally go right now to a bunch of websites and buy. In fact, right now I can go, there's a vape store down the road where you can buy the hemp derived THC which will still just. It's the same stuff and it gets you high. It's not even legal in North Carolina. They just don't really care anymore. Nobody's trying to enforce it because obviously the tide is turning against it and tons of states have already legalized it. The idea that the website that did basically this exact same thing for the overwhelming majority of what was on the website and that this is some horrible tragedy and great evil while people, the same people are literally driving by places that do the exact same thing today is an absurd claim. And he explicitly. It was not allowed. It was restricted. There were no guns on the Silk Road. There was no CP on the Silk Road. There was no. You couldn't like defraud people or sell hacked information to, you know, blackmail or try to steal from other people, the entire thing. And his explanation was a experiment in the free market. And there's also a lot of reason to suspect that there were a bunch of people. Well, it seems very clear that there were a bunch of people behind the DPR account and the lead investigator, who was more focused on Karpeles, Karpeles gave a, gave them, quote, unquote, a different target in exchange for immunity.
[00:34:04] Now I will say there is absolutely the possibility that he was still directly involved and he was still part of the DPR account. And it's possible that when Carl Forson, Shawn Bridges caused chaos on the site and started trying to blackmail a bunch of people and involved the DPR account and were trying to pin it on other people and convince the DPR account to go kill these people. And offering the DPR account to go kill these people. Maybe it was Karpellis, maybe it was Ashley Barr, but it also could be Ross Ulbricht. It could have just been some kid who was scared to death and took him up on the offer, thinking that he would save his own life. That is possible. And I don't think we will ever know because I do not believe he got a fair trial at all. And so much of what points to that is deeply unreliable. And people who were literally criminals, frauds and scamming tons of people in this situation and faking documents and evidence and changing and editing things to explicitly make it look like other people are guilty of stuff and convince other people that they need to commit crimes and then give them a bunch of Bitcoin should really lend a tiny amount of suspicion to the authenticity of any of those claims. And very, very importantly, he was not convicted of them. He wasn't even charged with it.
[00:35:42] He received two life sentences plus 40 years. And his charges work entirely around creating a website where other people mostly bought and sold small amounts of weed. Something I can do right now from companies that have registered businesses with the government.
[00:36:08] Also, practically every other person involved in this entire debacle got barely a few years for their involvement. Like the biggest seller on the entire Market served seven years in prison. The two creators of Silk Road 2.0, which had way more hard drugs, was bigger and had more listings than the original Silk Road and were more lenient about what they allowed. One of them got eight months and the other one three years for the exact same list of charges.
[00:36:47] He never stole from anyone. He ran a website. And he was not actually a huge vendor delivering actual drugs to people. The website was almost entirely for weed and minor drugs anyway. Guns, cp, all violence and fraud related products were strictly prohibited. He very possibly wasn't involved with the website anymore and may have been lured back in as a fall guy. And his clearly stated goal and principles were about building a place for peaceful, non violent trade. Because he disagreed with the idea of caging innocent nonviolent people for their use of a plant. Double life plus 40 years.
[00:37:32] The average time for a convicted murderer is 16 years. For a convicted rapist, average of 10 years, like 9.8 for any violent crime like armed robbery is less than five years. And then for just half of all violent offenders, people who explicitly and purposely violently attack another human being serve less than three years. Ross was convicted of none of it. There was no Violent crime on his list of charges. And the drug users who OD'd there were like five I think or maybe six, I can't remember exactly and I didn't forgot to write it down. Of people who OD'd who were loosely tied to the idea that this was all because of the Silk Road, that they were drug addicts or that they were drug addicts who used the Silk Road and then they died and one of them was on psychedelics and I jumped off a balcony. This was basically laid out as Ross being responsible for this. Who didn't. Again, he did not deliver the drugs. He didn't even sell the drugs. He was running the website that sold the drugs. I think it's pretty questionable to have someone's, to have a vendor or a website or a store be blamed on what someone does to themselves voluntarily. Even if you could directly link it to that. Because I've never heard of Walmart being shut down because one of somebody bought a gun at Walmart. Yes, you can buy a gun at Walmart in the south or they bought a hammer and they killed somebody or they bought a gun and they killed themselves. Because honestly the notion is ridiculous. If somebody does something to themselves, that person is responsible. And then there's just God knows a million cases of people who were sentenced who did so. So much worse than even the supposed worst that Ross Ulbricht could have done. Not even just talking about what he was actually convicted of, but the theoretical worst that he could have done and received far smaller sentences. There was Roy Russell who was convicted of multiple violent crimes, armed robbery, kidnapping, theft and arson. And then after being in California he got committed convicted of second degree murder. And that hit his three strikes which got got him life. However, there was a technicality that he appealed that because arson or something was out of state or no, maybe it was the kidnapping charge, I can't remember was out of state that it didn't count towards the three strikes. And so he got out and almost immediately he raped and beat and then strangled to death a 14 year old girl, Chelsea Harrison. They let that monster go and a child was raped and killed and he still I think only ended up with life. Ross got double life plus 40 years. There's a guy named Stoney Williams who was convicted of hiring a hit on his ex girlfriend and business partner and literally just ended up with probation because there was. The prosecution had a, had a problem with court deadlines. Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman and spent three months in jail. Like honestly it seems stupid to just Pick out these cases because literally the average of these is like five years. So the number of cases is practically endless. Ross Ulbricht, convicted of nothing but nonviolent crimes. Running a website where other people committed non violent crimes in which no one was harmed, directly or legitimately tied to any of his actions and certainly no intent or malicious behavior. A first time offender where everybody around him committing worse crimes, stealing, fraud, blackmail, who are literally directly in charge of evidence and in charge and had access and control over servers in which evidence was presented against him. All got barely a few years max I think of anybody involved was like 10 and he got double life plus 40 years.
[00:41:58] Now I don't care what you think, maybe you just believe everything about the government story.
[00:42:04] 12 years is enough. Even if it's true. He has served significantly more time than anybody else involved in any of this. He deserves a second chance.
[00:42:19] Now I want to read something from Vijay Boy Potty. That is just a short, really short post on Twitter just explaining the perspective and what people saw. For those who have been involved in this since the very beginning, he says, quote, Newcomers to Bitcoin may not understand why old timers care so much about Ross Ulbricht. Let me explain.
[00:42:44] He embodied the ethos of early Bitcoin more than anyone. He was an entrepreneur who created a thriving marketplace. He believed in radical freedom, including the freedom to trade anything with anyone else. So so long as it was peaceful and voluntary. He regularly wrote about his views on freedom and why he built the first truly successful bitcoin business, the Silk Road. He wanted to create a better world and believed his principles deeply. Politicians like Schumer targeted both Silk Road and Bitcoin as criminal enterprises that needed to be shut down. When he was convicted, the judge and the establishment threw the book at him. He was a first time non violent criminal and they locked him up and effectively threw away the key. In the early Bitcoin community we all felt just how unjust this was. It was like they were locking up one of our own out of spite for what we all believed was a peaceful revolution. Now tens of millions of people own bitcoin and many just because of number go up. Never forget there was a deeper purpose here and that getting rich is a nice side effect of that greater purpose. Fix the money, fix the world.
[00:44:08] Well said, well said, Vijay.
[00:44:11] And if Ross Ulbricht happens to ever listen to this, I just want to say I'm glad you're free man. You did not get a fair shake and everybody knows it. And I am so glad that you and everybody else that we can finally put this behind us. And I am so sorry that you have been sentenced to a lifetime of podcast appearances, but if you ever want to come on the show and have a chat, I would absolutely love to.
[00:44:41] That's so wild. I feel like this has gone on forever. I cannot believe that Ross is actually free.
[00:44:50] So with that, we'll close this episode out. Don't forget to check out the BitKit wallet link is in the show notes. If you were looking for an amazing on chain and lightning non custodial wallet for your phone. And then of course, if you're looking for a solid hardware wallet, the Blockstream Blockstream just released the Jade plus and you can get a 10% discount with my code right in the show notes. All right, we'll close it out. Thank you guys so much for listening. Don't forget to share this out with everybody. You know you are the reason this show grows and I will catch you all on the next one. Until then, everybody take it easy. Guys.
[00:45:44] Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
[00:45:50] Mahatma Gandhi.
