Feds say Silk Road suspect’s computer shows he (thought he) plotted 6 murders

While I believe a conspiracy like that is possible, I don't believe it to be plausible for the simple fact that DPR isn't worth the risk. The government doesn't need to paint drug dealers or black market operators in a bad light, and unless they fabricated their entire case against him, they probably have ample evidence to put him behind bars even if these screenshots were to be thrown out (supporting evidence for the attempted hits don't rest on those after all, they'll have logs and testimony as well.) They've already broken Silk Road and everyone already knows they can attack the deep web, and that Tor and Bitcoin aren't perfect bulwarks against the State.

Yeah, I get it. He ran a drug ring. A mail order drug ring on the internet, with real world consequences. I get that.

What I'm saying is this: There was no murder-for-hire skull duggery, until the sting provoked him into it. There were no murderous provocations without federal law enforcement in the picture, conflating the whole scenario with their invented personas that didn't exist.

That's the reality of what happened here.

They explicitly state that they taunted and coerced him, with fictitious sock puppetry. I'm not inventing that. That really happened.

So we're being asked (as internet jurors) to convict this guy on what he might have done if placed in a similar situation by real people. We're asked to throw him in jail because maybe he would have done something like this, eventually.

Except I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that he belived he was dealing with more than one person on the internet. He may have suspected that this was all an elaborate con game, architected by a single entity, and if he did suspect that, he'd have been right. Except that the single entity in this case was the FBI.

And bitcoin? $500,000 in bitcoin? First of all, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the bitcoin wallet he allegedly had at his command. But really, any exchange rate you'd like to apply here is as turbulent, and volatile, and imaginary as whatever we pretend bitcoin is worth in general. It's a virtual currency people are still grappling with. The concept of bitcoin wealth is as absurd as internet fame. Yeah it seems to have real world effects, but how long will it last, and do we take it at face value? If he went from nothing to multi-millionairre IN BITCOIN ONLY, almost over night, is that real money? Did he try to give real money to a real internet hitman?

The federal government acknowleges bitcoin's existence, but even they don't acknowlege it as a true currency. So when you boil it down, it's more like he committed some hypothetical crime for $500,000 in semi-precious baseball cards, or bottle caps or pogs. Bitcoin is regarded as a collector's item at the moment, and little more. You could say he did it for $500,000 in ham sandwiches, and you wouldn't be far off the mark. Maybe it's 7,500 KG of ham sandwiches? Are they fresh ham sandwiches, stored in a refrigerator? Maybe they're moldy ham sandwiches, but what if they're THE VERY HAM SANDWICHES THAT CHOKED MAMA CASS TO DEATH???

Maybe it's still quid pro quo, no matter how you look at it, but when you bandy about dollar amounts, don't pretend like that's an objective value.