Ross Ulbricht Found Guilty on All Charges

Ross Ulbricht is the man behind the alias ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, known to be the creator and owner of the digital black market Silk Road. On February 4, 2015, he was found guilty on all seven federal charges, and faces up to a lifetime in prison.
For the past four weeks, prosecutors in New York have sought to prove that Ulbricht is the (in)famous Dread Pirate Roberts, and is therefore guilty of drug trafficking, running a criminal enterprise, orchestrating a conspiracy to sell fake IDs, conspiring to sell hacking tools, and involvement in money laundering. A mountain of evidence was presented throughout the sittings, including Ulbricht’s personal diary, loads of chat logs, a trail of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from the Silk Road to his laptop, confessions of an old friend, and public details about Ulbricht’s life.
The heaps of evidence brought against Ulbricht seemed almost incontrovertible. But false nonetheless, the defense contended. In his final closing statements on Tuesday, Ulbricht’s lawyer Joshua Dratel maintained that Ulbricht did indeed create the Silk Road, but merely did so as an experimental free marketplace.
He never intended for it to become the digital drug bazaar that it turned out to be, nor was he involved with the website for most of its existence. Instead, he sold it to someone bearing the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR, who in turn made the Silk Road into the phenomenon it was. After having ran the website for several years, DPR’s exit plan was said to be cunning as it was dirty: he lured Ulbricht back to the Silk Road, planted evidence on his computer through BitTorrent, and perhaps even pointed three-letter-agencies in his direction. Or so Dratel wanted the jury to believe – to no avail.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-02-05.