Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is a mythical crypto figurehead of sorts. Vendors on his defunct darknet website accepted Bitcoin for drugs, weapons, fake IDs and other illegal wares. The illicit usage helped make the pioneer cryptocurrency popular.
It also earned the U.S. Department of Justice $6.5 billion in Bitcoin (BTC). The loot partly forms the basis of President Donald Trump’s calls for a federal strategic Bitcoin reserve.
A crypto devotee in his own right, Trump flexed the art of the deal when he granted the darknet market operator a full pardon within days of getting into office.
Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years, with no possibility of parole. His 2015 conviction linked various crimes, including drug distribution, to his operation of the website.
The sentence was widely criticized as inordinate, with libertarians organizing several platforms to lobby for Ulbricht’s release.
In 2024, libertarians found an unlikely ally in then-presidential candidate Trump, who promised to release the darknet supremo in return for Republican Party votes.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” President Trump announced on his Truth Social account on Jan. 22.
In sentencing Ulbricht, the judge said she would make him an example for presuming himself better than the laws of the United States.
Trump, who styled himself as a victim of political persecution during the election cycle, saw something of himself in Ulbricht.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me,” he said in his Truth Social statement.
There were more parallels. Just as Ulbricht is seen as a Bitcoin pioneer, Trump has been crypto’s single biggest popularizer in recent times.
Ross Ulbricht: A Contrast of Extremes
The pardon has divided opinion, with some people condemning it as a swing from one extreme to another. According to observers, the case has far-reaching implications with respect to the government’s commitment to fighting dangerous crime. It also raises questions regarding the relationship between crypto and the justice delivery system.
Hedi Navazan, chief compliance officer at DeFi ecosystem 1inch Network, told Cryptonews that the current debate is about proportionality in judgment.
“We have also seen a few other cases that in comparison to traditional finance, the verdicts have been not proportionate, as if for a certain reason crypto was under much more scrutiny, especially against its founders and builders,” Navazan argued.
Besides the sentencing making crypto a soft target for justice delivery, does the pardon not make Silk Road a favored child compared to other darknet markets? Navazan is willing to confront both sides of the conundrum, saying:
“Trump’s decision to pardon Ross Ulbricht displays worrying signs to the society: darknet platforms — the hives of illegal activity — can now operate while escaping punishment. The next logical question [is] should the same measures be applied to the founders of Hydra, Silk Road’s successor?”
Hydra, a darknet market, was infamously shut down in April 2022 after German and U.S. law enforcement combined efforts with other parties to arrest its creators.
As Navazan observed,
“What we see in the US is a striking contrast of extremes. In the beginning, we witnessed sledgehammer regulation by enforcement prior to the new presidential administration. Now, vice versa, there is sudden and unexplained softening toward the very forces that helped the dark web rise.”
The former HSBC executive cautioned against “mixed signals” regarding accountability in the digital age.
Tech Cold War
There’s a long-standing myth that tech geniuses deserve clemency. The Social Network, a David Fincher movie released in 2010, is based on the observation, “You can’t make a million friends without making a few enemies.”
Many stories exist about hackers landing jobs at top institutions after breaking into their systems. The Social Network sees a young Mark Zuckerberg pull off small white-hat hacks on Harvard’s network—something the university might secretly be proud of.
Russia has weaponized this myth for its national defense strategy. Under the Gerasimov Doctrine, which holds that nations are permanently engaged in soft war, jailbirds convicted of high-tech offenses are reportedly released to work for the military.
Trump is a Tech Cold War president, fighting on social media, AI, and, most notably, crypto fronts. Traditional ideas of justice might take a backseat to symbolic gestures that boost America’s soft power.
Impunity for Crime on the Dark Web
The dark web is the proverbial iceberg of the regular internet. Away from the scrutiny of polite society, anything goes, including child porn, drug trafficking, and paid murders. For some, Ulbricht is nothing less than a high-tech villain.
“The guy was a middleman for drug dealers. It’s like an evil version of eBay,” said a commentator on X.
“An overly strong sentence but he is being treated as Luke Skywalker and being donated money. I’m hoping he gives the money back to the parents who lost their children to drugs,” the person added.
In libertarian circles, however, the question of drugs is not as black and white as their unlawful status in much of the globe.
Justice reform activists like Walidah Imarisha believe that legalizing drugs is a potential solution to their weaponization against particular sections of society. Ulbricht was a complicated criminal.
To quote a Kendrick Lamar sample: “A gangster with a difference, because a gangster with a conscience.”
He thought about the ethical implications of the drug trade. The website eliminated violent turf wars and was interested in clean and organic production of the contraband.
While allegations of ordering a hit were referenced to stress Ulbricht’s moral blameworthiness, he was neither charged nor convicted of the crime. An initial charge was dropped, presumably because the evidence was insufficient.
One X user wrote that Ulbricht was supposed to be protected by Section 230 of the United States Constitution as he is not responsible for what other people did on his website.
“This is why Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, is not in prison for the CP and trafficking on Meta. But what happened to Ross doesn’t really have anything to do with that and no, Ross wasn’t put on prison for ‘ordering a hit’, either.”
Other sympathizers concurred. “If you go on Amazon today and order an item that turns out to be counterfeit (which is happening a lot), should Jeff Bezos go to jail since his website was used to sell counterfeit goods?” asked X user Will M. Cellen.
“It’s not a direct 1-for-1 to Ulbricht’s actions, but the main fact is that Ulbricht built a commerce site that was anonymous and decentralized. This did allow bad actors to make use of it, but does that mean he is guilty of drug trafficking?”
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