Is Ross Not the Dread Pirate Roberts After All?

By Jeffrey Tucker
Jan. 15, 2015

The trial of Ross Ulbricht, alleged to be the administrator of the Silk Road website that distributed illicit drugs peer-to-peer, opened with a shocker.

His attorney very quickly admitted that the Silk Road was Ross's idea. He envisioned a free market in the cloud in which people could circumvent prohibitions and restrictions and gain from trade in a peaceful and productive way.

That much I'm pretty sure that I knew.

Having done so, Ross's attorney continued, Ross realized that he was in way over his head, because, after all, there was a rather substantial amount of pent-up demand. Once the site started taking off, he handed the keys over to others.

Joshua Dratel explained: "He created it. As a free-wheeling, free market site, that could sell anything, except for a couple items that were harmful. It was an economic experiment. After a few months, it was too much for him. He handed it off to others."

This actually makes sense to me. It captures the spirit in which Ross created it. It was an experiment in how truly free markets could work. It was an extension of Ross's own libertarian idealism. Frustrated at the taxed and regulated world, and longing for liberty, he wanted to see what real freedom would look like in the real world.

His experiment worked and then some. He bailed and moved on. How did he end up being snagged from a public library with the administrator page opened?

"He was lured back by those operators, lured back to that library, that day," his attorney explained. "They had been alerted that they were under investigation, and time was short for them. Ross was the perfect fall guy. [Silk Road created] a digital contrivance that left him holding the bag when the real operators of Silk Road knew their time was up."

This explanation accounts for why Ross was not that fussy about hiding his identity. He was not meticulous. He lived and posted in the open, even using his name-based email address.

It explains why the new Silk Road opened within a week. The real admins decided that their founder had taken the hit for them.

It even explains why the very name Dread Pirate Roberts was used in the first place. It was intended as a name to be passed around from admin to admin.

Under this version of events, the real admins drew him back in, possibly to fix a technical problem, knowing full well that the feds were on him. So he nonchalantly opened his computer and started digging around. Out of nowhere, the feds pounced him and blamed him for the whole history of the site.

In other words, Ross is being prosecuted for starting an experiment in freedom. He was jailed for writing software. Yes, he probably knew there are legal risks to that, but it's very revealing of the state of the world. Establishing a free market, writing the code of a platform, not trading but merely creating a digital infrastructure on which others post, is a crime? We shall see.

As for the other crimes he is alleged to have committed, such as hiring hit men to go after users who threatened to reveal identities of sellers, there has never been a shred of evidence to suggest that is true.

As the trial unfolds, the feds are going to defend their view that Ross is really a mastermind behind a new global drug empire, held together by violence and cryptocurrency, and spreading narcotics all over the world.

On the Internet, however, a world of digits and self-regulating systems, things are not always as they seem. The feds are always ready to simplify in order to further the impression that they are in charge and running the world. It's nuts. Ross's story actually sounds far more plausible.

But what about the real Dread Pirate Roberts? There might be dozens of them by now, and they are not in jail. The Silk Road 3 is booming, as are another half dozen or so darknet narcotics markets.

Even if you hate drugs, even if you think that they are the bane of existence, you should still favor the flourishing of these online markets. They are working to take the gangland violence out of the trade and bring some quality control to the industry so that people don't die. They are also working to put the drug lords and drug cartels out of business. The only people who have a real interest in shutting them down are government and drug cartels.

But, in any case, the cat is out of the bag. The forces of supply and demand are too strong. No government can stop them. The Silk Road was indeed an experiment and it taught a lesson: if you can hide your identity, you can sell and buy illicit drugs. Government can slow this trend down but it cannot stop it.

We should cheer for Ross. He is an innovator, a person who changed history for the better. It would be a terrible tragedy for him to be locked up. Instead he should be celebrated as a creative mind of our time — and I say that whether or not he is the Dread Pirate Roberts. If all he really did was write software and hand off the keys, he should be working for a tech firm.

Regardless, he is already a folk hero. No one can take that away from him.
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Jeffrey Tucker is Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me (http://liberty.me/join), a subscription-based, action-focused social and publishing platform for the liberty minded. He is also distinguished fellow Foundation for Economic Education (http://fee.org), executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, research fellow Acton Institute, founder CryptoCurrency Conference, and author six books. He is available for speaking and interviews via [email protected]