Just wanted to commet here that I totally agree with you. The fact is this: At the very least, Ulbricht was running a drug trafficking operation, regardless if it was perceived as "decentralized". I don't see reddit getting up in arms when a Mexican Cartel leader gets indicted for drug trafficking charges or when a Mafia Don is found guilty of running drugs or organizing hits on people, regardless of "dirty cops" "influencing" these decisions. Ulbricht and his defense team attempted to appeal to the hacker under-thirty libertarian demographic in the same way Julian Assange does. For Ulbricht, it didn't work. I mean, he even called Silk Road an "international criminal enterprise" in the private journals he kept. He wasn't some naive anarcho-liberal kid trying to create a decentralized marketplace, he knew what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was harmful and illegal, otherwise he wouldn't have needed to go to the lengths that he did to keep Silk Road protected or anonymous. I don't really care if I'm downvoted for dissenting against popular opinion, but this isn't a Hollywood set-up. He directly contributed to corruption and exploitation by operating what basically amounts to an Internet based drug trafficking site. I mean the guy made the equivalent of 80 million in commission from the sales of illegal narcotics. He's not a "martyr". He'd sell out all of his supporters if it could save his own ass. I have to make it clear that I'm all for the legalization of all drugs. People own their bodies and deserve the right to do whatever they want with them. In this regard, I'm in line with some of the philosophy of Ulbricht. Where I depart from him is his actions. He appeals to people's sympathies in order to exploit them. He made money off of people's beliefs and parlayed then into a lucrative syndicate that not only benefitted him solely, but also held itself unnacountable to its own actions. This is traditional criminal and antisocial/sociopathic behaviour. All of this rhetoric about trying to set-up an economic model that was free from state-control is PR bullshit and backtracking by Ulbricht in what was an attempt to justify his behaviour to himself and others.