A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. He didn't have the capacity to visit this person in real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a real person or not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he couldn't have been sure of where they lived, because they didn't exist to begin with.
Another screen name claims to have the ability to reach out and eliminate the existence of this bothersome screen name. The only catch is that in order to have one user id destroy another user id, you have to part ways with an imaginary tally of digital crypto-currency.
This is not a case of high school classmates cyberbullying one another until one commits suicide. There was never any real world interaction, nor could there have been, because the target of the murder was always hypothetical. He couldn't have known for sure who was responsible for ANY of the screen names.
In contrast, consider cyber bullying, where a classmate knows for a fact that a given login assuredly represents a person they see everyday during class at school, and which point they begin a campaign of deliberate harassment and psychological warfare. One scenario involves verifiable individuals known to eachother in the real world, and the other scenario (the silk road hit) does not.
The drug trade and the bitcoin exchange for real money may portend that his intent to defend the black market network could potentially turn violent, and that perhaps he was of a mindset prone to acting as an accessory before the fact and an accomplice to murder, but nevertheless, I still question the reality of this sting operation, and what it may have actually represented to Ulbricht himself, in situ. Did he honestly think anyone was getting killed for bitcoins, if he never met them face to face? How can we know for sure?