Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

>I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.

Exactly. Everytime DPR gives an interview, it kicks the DEA in the balls and announces to the entire US through the media how inept they are. With this interview they can now go and get greenlighted double the resources to go after him. A guy here who was shipping seeds to the US was the only vendor caught out of dozens of storefonts doing the same thing because he was the only politically active one by funding NORML and other US legalization movements. They singled him out as the target to go after and even mentioned this in their press release after they caught him.

DEA go after low hanging fruit to get more press/funding, and whoever is making them look bad or is political. If you just stay in your quiet corner of the darknet and sell drugs they are more apt to leave you alone for the guy talking to Forbes beacuse there's only so much resources to go around. There's another market, BMR that you never hear much about because he's smart enough not to give interviews even though the site has been talked about in mainstream media articles as well. He learned his lesson saying too much when he closed down his clearnet site and let it slip he was starting BMR. Considering he's still operating without being arrested kind of obvious where the resources are going to (making an example of DPR, if they ever catch him).

Even worse he's calling out his competition which is a big mistake. It's like this guy has zero knowledge of the carding world and all the market vs market attacks that have gone on since the late 1990s. They sold drugs on those sites too

Yes, that's one approach, but I think it'd be a major logistical challenge to coordinate with every single local police department whose zip code you happen to be shipping to. Easier to just scam customers and not deliver. :)

I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

Failing that go looking for hosting services that accept bitcoin, or online wallet services esp one's coded in php, since this guy has expertise in that area it's logical to assume he's running a hosting front so when the feds come in to seize the servers, he would be the guy they ask to retrieve it. You wouldn't want to trust your multi-million dollar drug site to colocation you'd want to see your server all day and be able to get to it or notice if somebody sabotaged it. He kind of already dropped he had physical control of the server when it crashed once while he was "out of town". Now cash out a lot of your coins and pretend it's for contract services, DDOS, hosting ect. You could also then enjoy plausible deniability, claiming an unknown customer set that site up and it wasn't you. Since your site accepts bitcoins, you have a reason to be using them. All well and good.. unless you talk too much and drop intel on yourself so they can use other circumstantial evidence against you in court.

He would also have to launder and sell all those coins. If I were him I'd be selling them directly to buyers in an underserved country using a decoy clearnet fixed-rate exchange, or I'd also be running my own small exchange and dumping coins in it, using fake ID scans and paying for traffic to simulate customer records. I'd probably also run my own mixing service like bitfog, lending service, or online casino/betting site to help launder them. If there's any large bitcoin investment funds still around I'd be all over that too, getting new coins out from other investors and giving them my SR coins.

Feds can identify the operators of all the above and then compare them to identity markings DPR has dropped on himself. Anybody with a 60% or higher chance of fitting the profile mark them for long term surveillance they will slip up eventually. Feds already know all of this.. which is why you need to be incredibly careful and never get too comfortable running the world's biggest outlaw darkmarket. Satoshi is a good example of excellent OPSEC. Never once did he stray from the topic of development of bitcoin. There is only 1 post in his entire bitcointalk history that does and it was when he chastised some idiots who wanted to sign up Wikileaks back in 2010 for donations, warning them Bitcoin would be killed before it could even start. He certainly didn't talk about politics with the exception of his genesis block comment. He also seemed to have had chosen a fictitious personality and slid in and out of it confusing anybody trying to go after him. Every unique phrase or word he wrote was analyzed then looked for in old whitepapers and mailing lists... nothing.

He also doesn't give interviews

Why doesn't he go ahead and state the logical extension of that, which is that every product made in any organized society requires some level of coercion? Chomsky is long on criticisms of capitalism but short on suggestions for replacing it.

If anything : decentralized vs centralized currency.

For the laymen : Nobody owns Bitcoin. Liberty Reserve owned Liberty Reserve.

It's as simple as it gets.