Saturday, January 17, 2015

Dread Pirate Roberts supporters thrown for a moral loop.

The radical libertarian world was just hit with a bombshell revelation the other day. Previously, the defense team of Ross Ulbricht surprised us by admitting that Ross was the originator of Silk Road, however they claim that Ross left the position after only a few months, handing it off to another entity. This "real" Dread Pirate Roberts, the one who ran the site for the the bulk of the time, eventually went on to drag Ross back in to frame him when he felt the heat from the Feds. Well, now the plot thickens; the defense team is naming a name: long time MtGox operator Mark Karpelès, the one who held the reins when it collapsed and who a lot of people are bitter towards. Furthermore, they have evidence to that end, as a federal agent testified that Mark was their original lead before they went after Ross.

This initially seems like a cause for small celebration. Here is a chance that Ross Ulbricht can be free, or at least substantially reduce the sentence he is liable to receive. But let's slow down for a second because I think we've lost a little moral clarity here. It seems that at a certain point, the focus drifted from supporting the heroic operator of the legendary Silk Road marketplace to supporting one Ross Ulbricht. Only allegedly the same thing, as some libertarians are quick to point out. According to the defense team of our hero Ross, the "real" Dread Pirate Roberts, operator of Silk Road marketplace, is Mark Karpelès. Well, if we're in this because we support the Silk Road, shouldn't our support now turn toward Mark?

There are now only two approaches to take with regard to Mark. Either we can be happy he is taking the heat off of Ross or not happy. Suppose we're happy. This is, after all, a guy who ran MtGox into the ground, caused many people to lose a lot of bitcoin, and, as some suspect, even ran off with a lot of the btc himself. Even if we don't support people going to jail for facilitating drug sales, we can perhaps be content in this sort of poetic justice. If Ross, the human being, is found not guilty or responsible for being Silk Road's operator, we still of course can cheer that an innocent man is allowed to be free, or have a reduced sentence for his reduced role. But wait – then we're conceding that the real heroic Dread Pirate Roberts, operator of the legendary Silk Road marketplace, is in fact not a hero. Suddenly we're happy to see him behind bars. Remember how defensive we were when Ross was charged with soliciting a murder-for-hire? As our focus has turned toward our sympathy for Ross, the human being, we may have forgotten what we originally supported: The idea of a free market pioneer, morally true, despite and even because of complete disregard for the law.

Okay, so suppose we're willing to forgive Mark the transgressions from MtGox, and not hold it against him in his capacity as the DPR. Suppose the murder-for-hire charge doesn't apply to him, either. Or maybe he wasn't the DPR in the first place. In that case, we still don't have such a cause to celebrate this latest move from Ross' defense team. It just transferred most of the heat from one innocent man to another. But it's even worse than that, because now, Ross, our libertarian folk hero, the one who still started the Silk Road, is in fact a snitch who just fingered an innocent man, possibly the heroic real Dread Pirate Roberts. This is not at all to say that I wouldn't forgive Ross for doing so, nor that I wouldn't do the same thing under the circumstances. However it does hurt our cause for having supported him in our ideological capacity, and taint the minor hero status that he'd still earned for starting the site and running it a few months. At the very least it may send a mixed message if we continue to support Ross under this favorable view of Mark.

I suppose the best possible outcome, from a libertarian stance, is that Ross knows Mark had nothing to do with Silk Road and the Feds have nothing on him, but Ross's defense team still uses him to create enough reasonable doubt to set Ross free. Seems a bit of a long shot, though. So really, this is not a great situation in liberty land.