Welcome back everyone. I am Caspian Sea.
I am here as usual with my partner in crime Bennett Tomlin.
How are you today doing well? Cass.
How are you? I'm doing good.
We are joined by Nick Weaver a lecturer at UC Berkeley and a
researcher at the icsi. Yep.
It's a pleasure to have you on today, Nick.
How are you? Excellent.
Longtime listener first-time caller.
Well, it's a pleasure to have you on and I look forward.
To today's topic, we're going to be talking about how Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies at least in their first iteration I guess
we're mainly used as a payments Network for the dark web for
Silk Road for stuff like that kind of how that has stopped and
how it really doesn't seem like there's much of a like it's more
of a speculative Market more than anything else now a
gambling Market. Yes.
So let's first talk about my background.
Though, I started looking at the cryptocurrency space back in
2012 because the research group I'm involved with focuses a lot
on online criminality. And so like, one of the things
we're looking at, is back in the day, you could break into
computers and make money by the mining Bitcoin before the
graphics cards and then the Asics ruined that for the bad
guys and like, had colleagues Sarah Michael, John in
particular, she was the one who first came up.
The Bitcoin tracing infrastructure and the
heuristics to do that. The thing is most people who
looked at the space, in 2012, 2013.
They looked at it go. This is bogus and ignore it or
they become True Believers. But I had a business model, that
allowed me to watch the space continuously that I can watch
the space extract, the comedy gold, which is amusing for me
and turn it into both academic papers and non academic writing.
And so, I've been able to Watch the space as a professional
critic, since basically, the very beginning.
I remember when pirate at 41st exist it came on the scene and
frankly calling your pyramid scheme Celsius network is just
nowhere near as classy as calling it pirate saving some
trust they just don't make them like Trend and Shavers anymore.
Do they know they don't make them like the pirate look.
Do you want to give our listeners?
Just a little bit of an introduction.
Tune in to what Silk Road and some of the similar dark web
marketplaces. Where like in 2012 there was
this guy Ross ulbricht to suffered from what it's best
described as libertarian. Brain worms and Ross, ulbricht
observed, a few things, the first was there were a new
payment infrastructure on the field and that was Bitcoin and
Bitcoin promised. No intermediaries.
And at the time people He thought that it was Anonymous
during this time, there was a criminal alternative out there,
Liberty reserve. But this was a central service.
You'd turn your dollars into Liberty reserve dollars and you
could pass them around and turn them back and this was actually
really useful for the criminals but it didn't in trance obrecht
because it was a central service and also theoretically not
necessarily Anonymous. If the feds ever took over
Liberty reserve, If which they did but if you just put up a web
page to sell drugs you would get got but tore the anonymity
network has this feature that allows you to do, what are known
as hidden Services. They've rebranded them as onion
services but it's the same thing.
You get a real long random name. It was at the time about 20
characters of random garbage. Edge these days.
It's 50 characters of random garbage.
And with the Tor Browser, you could connect to those sites and
your communication bounces around through six computer
scattered all over the world. So the FBI can't discover where
the server is. So Innovation number one, use
Bitcoin Innovation number to do it as a Tor hidden service so
that the FBI can't find where the server is but there was
another innovation in Silk Road. The problem with being a good
criminal is, you need a reputation for being
trustworthy. Now, this is a real problem when
dealing with non face-to-face transactions, how do I know
Bennett that you're a trustworthy person?
I don't, but you don't have to trust your drug dealer in silk
wrote, you only have to trust Silk Road itself.
So the idea with silk road is there were two other additions.
Mandatory feedback ich lassic, 12 5 star rating and the market
acted as escrow. So you trusted the market not
the dealers. So if you wanted to buy drugs on
Silk Road, you log into Mount cocks by some Bitcoin on Mount
Cox transfer to Silk Road. Once you're at Silk Road, you
log in through the Tor Browser and you browse through all the
drugs, really the market, cling to be a libertarian.
In market for everything but it was drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs,
drugs, drugs drugs, drugs books, about drugs, drugs, drugs drugs
and so on. And so you arranged to buy your
pot, you transfer the Bitcoin to the seller except you don't you
transfer it in your account to the seller's account on Silk
Road. But Silk Road is an escrow
service. So your money is held by Silk
Road until you get the Drugs, click on the review button
saying, oh this is some good Prime 0 grade-a because let's
face it was actually mostly pot. That was being sold and Silk
Road, then transfers the money to the seller.
And so Silk Road was the intermediary on every drug deal
because they were active participant, but this meant that
they mediated out, the trust issues.
The problem is, is you We need to trust somebody but with the
dark Market concept, you don't trust the Dealer's, you just
trust the marketplace because if the dealer rips you off, you
just tell the marketplace the dealer ripped me off and you get
your money back. That's really not.
I mean, it's not a stupid idea. I know.
Yeah. I mean I'm listening to you
describe it and I'm like, seems pretty reasonable.
Yes. Certainly interesting though in
the context of Bitcoins history, right?
And in the White paper where you have Satoshi talking about,
trying to eliminate credit card, charge backs in the like.
And so, instead of relying on censorship irreversible
payments, you're holding me assets with this Escrow in order
to do these kind of transactions that at first glance seem
well-suited to Bitcoins censorship resistance, being
purchasing, drugs and other illicit items.
Yes. And it's quite obvious that once
you start to look at real world, Times being able to articulate
who you trust makes the systems work.
So, since the time people have kept trying to build truly
decentralized, dark markets, like open bizarre and stuff like
that and those are just always fail because those you actually
do have to trust the drug dealer, or trust a random escrow
service that being gamed and being able to do centralized
trust make system so much more cheaper and workable.
And that was one of the The first lessons if silk road is,
you need to trust somebody in the criminal and world and a
central Marketplace is a much easier thing to trust.
And the other thing is, is there's a lot of amusing stories
from the time. One of the things that Silk Road
did early on, is they wanted to be a Marketplace for everything.
Now, everything has to include weapons, but there's this is
where the marketplace end. Going up against libertarian
ideals that your right to throw a punch stops at my nose.
So what is the morality of selling weapons?
You could either sell them, not sell them.
But the problem is it's not selling them.
You don't make the money because as the marketplace Silk Road got
a 10% cut and yeah the guns are a small fraction of the business
but you still don't want to leave money on the table.
So what do you do if you're faced with this conundrum?
Um, sell guns, don't sell guns. I presume they just decided to
sell them. They did not on the table.
They didn't they split the baby with the bathwater.
So instead they created a spin-off site called The Armory
moved, all the weapons sales on to the Armory.
And so continued selling guns, just no longer under the Silk
Road brand until the Armory collapsed because nobody wants
to buy guns through a Tor hidden.
Mrs. Because the markets were very u.s.
Centric your person in the u.s. you want a gun.
You're not a felon. You go in, you plunk down your
money and you get a gun, you are a felon.
You go to a state that doesn't have private party purchases,
you buy one off of Craigslist, meet at the local Walmart, do
the exchange in cash and then if your gun ever gets caught the
seller, just goes how was I supposed to know, Jesse Pinkman.
Was the meth king of Albuquerque.
But if you want to really get in legal trouble by a gun and ship
it through the mail because the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco
Firearms explosives and no you're not allowed to have any
fun things at all whatsoever. Takes a really, really, really
dim view on shipping guns through the mail, not to a
licensed dealer. And so this was turning a
business that's criminal but low risk, it You insanely criminal
and insanely high risk and Incredibly blinking on the radar
of the feds. And so, the gun sales actually
ended up going away because when you split them off into your own
site, you quickly realize it doesn't actually work for bad,
dudes. That was at you.
One of the interesting things about the history of Silk Road
to me is the things they forbade because at least on the surface.
The Silk Road terms of service, forbade child pornography
stolen, credit cards assassinations, which Is
humorous. Considering some things Ross
would later try and weapons of any type which then caused these
other black markets to pop up to try to offer the services that
Silk Road refused to. So it's just this interesting
Dynamic during this period of silk road trying to create this
more Limited Marketplace which just then created nearly
identical Market places with less rules.
My immediate question about this is, I know, obviously, we
haven't gotten there yet, but obviously, I think anyone is
pretty gonna go. And out pretty quickly that the
Silk Road got shut down by the FBI and that it came to a
screeching halt. I know that there were briefly
afterwards, some attempts to do, like, a Silk Road 2.0, kind of
kind of thing. And, but I do find it.
Kind of interesting that it doesn't seem like any of them
have ever reached that level of popularity since then, well,
they have but they haven't gotten the public view because
the problem is is it's just not A very good business, but it's
high profile enough that the feds take it seriously.
So the marketplaces keep coming and going, but the feds go after
them because well, let's face it, it fun.
If you're FBI agent dealing with say Prime on the dark web, you
can go after child exploitation and the officers who do that are
real heroes, but if you go after the drug dealers, it's a lot
more fun. So, They've basically gone after
the market operators ever since so like after Silk Road got
busted Silk Road to spun up that was run by a guy called Blake
been Thal. He was arrested within about
nine months and he had enough sense to plead out and a rat on
all his fellows. And as far as I know, I think he
might even be out of jail soon. And so the markets are still
around there. Just also a lot harder to find
because what has happened is Is the gateways to the markets.
Have been busted by the feds. So there was this site called
Deep dot web, which acted as an index to the dark markets and
reviews. And the problem is is deep.
Deep. Webs monetization strategy was
taking money in the form of Bitcoin from the darknet
operators. In order to basically advertise
said, dark drug dealers and they Shut down by the FED center.
Now gasps of the federal government read it for a while,
had our Dark, Net markets and you could log in and read all
the fun drama. What after deep top web got shut
down, read it goes. Yeah, this is a little too
radioactive for us and band that group.
And so now basically the only way to find the current state of
the darknet markets is, there's a Tor hidden service called
dread, which is basically Redick.
As a Tor hidden service, but that's really a pretty annoying
barrier to entry. But also the thing is, is part
of the reason why the darknet markets, never got that big is
Bitcoin sucks for payments. We actually saw that right?
From the start at cell crept. The problem is, is Bitcoins
price bounces up and down and even if it bounced up and down,
randomly 12 percent a day, this would be really annoying.
But Frances, 110 percent a day on a bad day.
And so the marketplace had to do escrow.
So I buy 50 bucks worth of drugs on the dark Market.
You receive the $50 it gets, put in escrow, and by the time
escrow gets released, its now, $40.
What's your reaction going to be alternative?
It goes up. Oh, crap, I spent $60 for this.
We did not fit. 50, so, volatility really hurts for
payments and it is specially Hertz for payments.
When there's an escrow process involved Silk Road was the only
Dark Net Market that I know of, that was able to solve the
problem. And that's because what they did
is they had a optional Arbitrage service where if you as a seller
wanted protection against volatility, the Silk Road bought
Would sell the Bitcoin on Mount Goths and then buy it back to
transfer it to you when you actually cleared escrow.
And so it turns out, one of the biggest craters on Mount gawks.
That wasn't a bot run by karpeles.
Was a bot run by Ross ulbricht to protect his customers from
the variations on bitcoin price. I didn't know about Silk Roads
Arbitrage, but that's funny, that's actually kind of how the
light strikes. Like lightning networks
implementation for remittances work, is its selling and buying
Bitcoin at both ends to deal with the volatility to because
you're trying to transfer a certain amount in dollars of
another, classic example of how Bitcoin is a pain.
That's just kind of like, and of course, knocks proved to be not
the most reliable counterparty either, but so silk robe did a
wonderful Bitcoin, though. Because Silk Road, Is what got
Bitcoin on the map because before that time you ask
anybody, what Bitcoin is that Go.
Whoo, but the big expose on the Silk Road, got a lot of
attention going it. But even at the time, as I said,
you never saw a huge amount of transactions because it turns
out it's not the most reliable way to buy drugs.
And you're, depending on the mail which means you often have
records of who goes to wear, And also, well, the marketplace has
got taken down. Let's jump forward about a year
to the fall of Ross, ulbricht. The FBI had a miracle low down
from heaven. Comes the IP address of the
server and Iceland. That was running Silk Road and
low down from heaven. The FBI flies out to Silk Road
copies. The server comes home and gets
basically all the information they need to show that Ross
ulbricht was the dread pirate. Roberts.
So they then go into San Francisco and when Ross ulbricht
is logged into the Silk Road Administration console on his
computer in the public library, chatting with an undercover
agent, who's playing a Silk Road admin on said, undercover
Council. There was a fight in the
library, just behind him, he turns around.
And the FBI tackles in, with the forensics tool kit, there are
literally screenshots where the FBI took cell phone, photos of
that laptop open on the Silk Road admin, interface logged in
as dread, pirate Roberts in the live chat, just to have that
record and then they found out that Ross.
Ulbricht made the Stringer Bell, mistake Stringer Bell's.
Maximum, don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy.
He took notes. Oh boy, did he take notes?
It was literally, hey. Prosecutors.
Here's how you prove who I am and so the evidence was just
huge things, like there was a heat in Russell bricks trash
discussing notes on how to improve the Silk Road rating
system and the phone number of his most recent date.
And so the feds called the date just to be able to authenticate
the phone number. But here's a question.
How did that Miracle occur? You can guess?
Yes, remember the official story was that it was Was a Miss
configuration that ended up leaking the IP address related
to I want to say it was like the image server something.
Yes. And guess what?
That was a lie. It was the FBI.
Got caught lying about how they discovered the surfer in the
evidence is a nice set of server logs.
That showed that that was not what they saw on the net.
They did not see the cops on the net, the captured does not leak
on That I confirmed with a colleague who is crawling Silk
Road at the time that the captcha never left the net or
never escaped onto the net. Because if it did he would have
told the FBI because he's a good little researcher and there was
a public-facing web service that was a admin console.
That if you Google for there's 20,000 copies scattered over the
internet. Now the thing is that the time
there was no way to write a warrant not saying I want to
hack a unknown service. That's located.
Who knows? Where in the world to find its
IP address and so they didn't get a warrant.
They just went and hack the server and found its IP address
and the defense caught them. So the defense in the court
filings actually caught, the FBI agent, literally lying to the
court in his testimony. In his written testimony that
headache. Yeah, agent.
Incidentally, never testified in the case because if he did, he
would have gotten torn apart on the stand for previously, lying
to the court. So why is Ross ulbricht in jail?
It's just because of the selling drugs and stuff on and they got
your note. It's because his attorney was a
Flippin idiot. So you catch the FBI literally
lying about how they found evidence like this, you get it
to pray. Rest, if you get the surfer
suppressed, you get everything suppressed.
Because there's this notion in court that evidence that follows
on from the suppressed, evidence gets suppressed.
Unless the prosecutor can show, oh, we would have found it some
other way. The problem is, is the
prosecutor actually had the evidence showing that was not
sufficient. So rasul bricks name actually
popped up on the FBI's radar. For they found the server
because of one or two wacky. Little post early on Advertising
Silk Road. That was not sufficient to get a
warrant for his Gmail account because if it was, they would
have gotten them before. They got the server.
Therefore there's actually evidence in court that the
counterfactual of, if we didn't get the server we would have
found Ross, ulbricht anyway showing.
Yeah, you didn't have enough to get a warrant then.
Then you wouldn't have ever been able to find him.
Why don't they bring this to court now?
Why don't they try to get this this done?
Because it's too late on a peel, you can only bring up issues
that you brought before. And so what happened in court is
the defense goes, oh, I see this FB, I lied suppress the server
and then it suppresses everything.
And then the prosecution goes, oh wait a minute, you see under
fourth Laughter suppressing stuff.
You have to claim it as yours. You have to have some privacy
interest. So what would have to happen is
Ross, ulbricht would have to write a statement saying, yes,
that is my server K. Thank you very much AKA admit,
that he's the dread. Pirate Roberts, there's an
asterisk on this admission if he did this, that admission only
appears in court. If he ever testifies and he was
never going to testify because he was Sitting on the dread.
Pirate Roberts. Stash of Bitcoin on his laptop.
So why didn't the defense claimed the server?
As being over X, there's three possibilities.
All brick was insisted on. I'm going to testify and the
attorney wasn't able to convince them.
Otherwise or what I think is most likely is that would be an
admission in the court of public opinion.
And the lawyer wanted to get paid because the lawyer although
he was milking Being Ross, all Brookes mom for a huge amount.
Another large amount was just donations, there was a lot of
donations paying for the defense hey I donated my one Bitcoin
after he was convicted just to pay off some debts.
I don't think the lawyer wanted to affect the donation stream
but in any case as soon as the judge basically who literally
did a written order that was handwritten basically dude.
You You sure about this, are you sure you want to throw with the
case right now and the defense threw away the kiss and that
made the prosecution very, very amusing fast forward to opening
arguments opening arguments. Prosecution was.
Oh this is Silk Road blah blah. Blah.
Defense opening arguments were amusing.
First was. Yeah he may have started Silk
Road but he left and then he came back and that You know,
good against all the conspiracy charges because if you leave a
conspiracy and come back to the conspiracy, you're responsible
for crimes committed by could the conspiracy in the meantime
and also owe all that Bitcoin Ross, Albrecht had because he
was sitting on a million multimillion-dollar Fortune back
when Bitcoin, which worth bleep, all he was just a good Bitcoin
Trader or minor something at the time the prosecution.
Didn't realize just how stupid this was.
I did, I spent half our coding up some code and showed that 20%
of the Bitcoin went directly from the Silk Road wallet to
Ross. All Brooks wallets because we
knew them because they were seized by the FBI.
Here's 70% or so that almost certainly from Silk Road to Ross
ulbricht because it just goes through a couple little
intermediate steps and cold. Male prosecutors oh you do
realize, this is total bull, you have the private wallet files
which means you have all the Bitcoin addresses ever used and
can therefore traits all the old Bitcoin to at which point the
prosecution quickly got their own expert.
Who did the analysis with the private wallet files that
showed. Hey, basically every Satoshi
that Roswell brick had came from Silk Road and oh Oh, this lovely
little payment to this dude called red and white.
This came from Ross, all bricks personal stash because you see,
Ross ulbricht was a Libertarian, and there's this great
libertarian ideal of self-help. So what do you do?
If somebody rips you off worse, what happens?
If somebody rips off your customers.
So one of the early scams on Silk Road was this guy called
Tony, 76 did a bunch Desales got a good reputation.
Oh, big 420 sale. Oh my competition is going to
disrupt it. So you're going to have to click
the finalize early and not put the money through escrow and of
course, Tony 76 took the money and ran.
So good. Libertarian ideals is you should
hire a hit man to take out Tony 76.
But then again, good libertarian.
Ideals are if some idiot thinks you're a hit, man, you might as
well lose them for every penny you get and not actually do the
hit. So Ross ulbricht tried over the
course of his career at Silk Road to have six.
People murdered all of them catastrophically fail.
There were five through red and white that were brought up in
the Silk Road trial. So they had the chat logs
between DPR and red and white. They had the Bitcoin being
transferred to red and white. And they had a stipulation in
the trial that he proved incompetent.
There's no evidence he actually got anybody.
Old. But he tried and that made him
at difference for the drug. Kingpin charges that trying to
protect your criminal Enterprise by having people assassinated
does kind of lend Credence to you being a drug kingpin.
And so that was actually brought up in the trial.
It's just not charged as a separate element because, well,
he didn't actually succeed in killing anybody.
The defense though was just shambolic, they they They at the
last minute, try to get two expert Witnesses, one of which
is the one I'd hire in New York to turn into a prosecution
witness for computer forensic stuff.
And the other was the Bitcoin hammer and innopolis or
whatever. What his name was one of the big
Bitcoin guys in 2013 or so very famous for a photo of him,
licking a mining Hammer that was his first hit on Google Images.
At the time of the trial. And so basically what happened
is is by that point, the defense was lost, he was guilty on all
charges and basically sentence too much life in prison plus, 50
sort of thing showing the travesty of the sentencing that
we do. And I lay it at the fault of the
attorney that what the attorney should have done is claimed the
server when the motion to suppress fails because the FBI
Guy tries some blah blah, blah of.
We didn't know where the warrant was.
You plead guilty contingent that you are allowed to appeal, the
motion to suppress and you plead out to 30 years but that's not
what happened. Yeah, I agree the end result of.
That is a travesty to Justice and it's nice to hear you speak
to that. But let's get back to the point
of this being being that bit. Point now has failed as a
payment mechanism, at least, and even back then, as you were
saying, it's, it was volatile, but it sounds like the Silk
Road. Arbitrage bot was able to fix
that to some degree, right? Yeah.
The Arbitrage fought could fix the volatility to some degree,
but at a cost, this is now makes the market traceable.
If you run a market, you're going to have to do either one
of two things, either you're going to be eating the risk of
Bitcoins. Price jumping up and down and if
you're going to want to eat that risk, you're going to want to
charge a lot more for it, or you're going to have to go on a
Marketplace and that's going to be traceable.
And the other thing is, is Bitcoin by its nature.
Is prosecution Futures there have been cases where like five
years out, mount gox. Data is used in prosecution of
early Silk Road drug dealers because it can be Bitcoin
tumblers. There's A lot of Bitcoin
tumblers out there. The biggest one thing they
arrested the guy behind Bitcoin fog, a lot of the other ones
have been arrested and that in a traceability is actually a real
pain for the bad guys because you can be anonymous now, but
the feds get more information and you cease to be anonymous.
What are people relying on in these dark dark web marketplaces
than if they're not? Not using Bitcoin anymore.
I mean, are they using mineiro or they using, you know, some
are using mineiro which sucks even more than Bitcoin or
they're just using Bitcoin tumblers and hoping they don't
get caught? I think the success against the
Tumblers and against the dark, net Market Associated tumblers
like the G Helix search engine and Tumblr service.
The guy behind that was arrested a couple of years.
Back that the feds have just basically made the darknet
markets unusable because it's hard to find them mineiro is,
yeah, mineiro is hard to trace, but it's very easy to go to the
exchanges and say, who's buying mineiro and transferring it
away, and who's selling Monaro? And go after them that way,
because, well, you don't want to hold on to this stuff.
And so, the net result is the A payment system.
This is the one case for payment censorship resistant payments
but it's it's hard and that has acted as the bandwidth
bottleneck for these guys. It does seem really challenging
to maintain anonymity indefinitely into the future on
a public Ledger. Where every single transaction
is logged in known to every participant and worse where
you're located in the Ask for shipping reasons, where Bitcoin
still works for criminal activity is ransomware.
And that's not because the feds can't find out who the
ransomware purveyors are it's that you can't extradite
somebody from the beaches of Sochi that makes sense.
I mean on that note, do you think the preferred currency of
criminals would be US Dollars? And and on that note, we had, we
had a chat with Rohan gray on here and he's keen on seeing a
Some sort of CBD, see that retains privacy for the users
and I don't hear much about that from anyone in terms of the the
hope that some sort of digital dollar will maintain the Privacy
that cash affords users. How are you?
How are you, what are your thoughts about this?
And what do you think is the future for the US dollar and for
Bitcoin and stuff like that? So Bitcoin.
Committed a crime against me personally.
It is made somebody with Silicon Valley libertarian leadings
believe in the Stark fist of money.
Laundering laws cash is anonymous, but cash requires,
physical, proximity, and mass 5 million dollars in cash is a
couple of huge roller cases. It's going to be your weight
allowance on an InterContinental flight and you can't transfer
it. Remotely privacy.
If you want privacy, you get cash.
But cash has these physical limits that limit the total
amount of criminality that works because you just got a drag the
stuff around. I don't see any electronic
payment system that supports privacy at scale and the reason
why is because when you do you get the ransomware problem that
the ransomware problem is specifically because we
currently have a economically viable not very good.
But economically viable payment system, where you can transfer
five million dollars to some Rando and Russia.
Any Central Bank, digital currency is going to have to
have anti-money laundering and protections.
It's not going to allow pseudonymous accounts because
the pseudonymous accounts with public Ledger's or still
pseudonymous accounts, it's every account is a numbered
Swiss account that doesn't work and even The notion of limiting
it to say, 500 dollar accounts that does you no good when you
can spin up as many pseudonymous accounts as you want?
So any viable electronic payment system that doesn't want to get
overrun by criminality has to have strong, Notions of identity
and lack of privacy because otherwise we have the proof of
what happens. And that's Colonial Pipeline and
hospitals ransomware and stuff like that.
That I have an aside thought that's going back a little bit
and is unrelated to this, but I did not previously know about
Silk Roads. Arbitrage bought that relied on
macaques, but when you mentioned it, it flagged in my mind
because I remember at one point, Ross is lawyers, argued that the
actual dread pirate Roberts was not Ross, but was karpeles of
mountain, Ox Fame. And so, that's in an interesting
claim. Now, with the knowledge that
they were, they like actively trading on Mount cocks.
Do you have any thoughts on the probable involvement of karpeles
in? So I don't think it was involved
at all. I think he just viewed it as
good for business. And at the time, the feds
weren't serious at all about money, laundering regulations on
bitcoin exchanges. So he was like, yeah, whatever
people are buying Bitcoins, people are selling Bitcoin.
It's all good for me. I'm going to keep awake.
I can't actually run a system, right?
And my Bitcoin is draining out. It just always seemed like such
a strange claim to make to me after Ross, had been arrested
with his laptop open and logged in, but I remember them trying
to make it and it was always just a curious little factoid to
me. Well, it's because basically the
defense was throw everything at the wall and hope something
sticks. Like one of the things they try
to do and failed is there was the fifth hit that Ross ulbricht
attempted and that was with a corrupt undercover DEA agent.
Who is trying to Blackmail Ross. It's also why he thought hits
were less expensive is because the feds for a fake, it don't
charge nearly as much as a scammer for a fake.
It and said, undercover, agent was trying to Blackmail, Ross,
going. I know who you are.
You're an athlete as bad. Oh, and the defense actually
tried to get that chat introduced as evidence without
the addition of. Oh, hot, Ross going.
Oh, ha ha. Ha you and without the notion
that, oh, this was a corrupt DEA agent who was known to be
corrupt and blackmailing Ross. So, hey, the defense was creepy.
It was not an effective defense, but for those of us watching and
Reading the transcripts. And with our popcorn machine up,
it was an amusing defense. Guess you have anything else?
The only other addition that I'd like to comment on is that it
sounds like you're saying Bitcoin is failed because it's
not or that Bitcoin has is has failed as a payments mechanism
because it's not been widely adopted for that use.
But in reality, it hasn't completely failed, right?
We're still saying that there's dark markets, where they're
using Bitcoin, where they're using Monera where they're
using. Cryptocurrencies.
And as you said, yeah, like, the primary way to utilize that
effectively is, as a ransom ransomware hacker, getting a
payout in Russia, or the Ukraine, but I guess I'm
wondering. It sounds like they're still, it
still is being used for payment sometimes.
Yes, but it's not being used very much and it hasn't gotten
very big. It's like the quip of you do
know this poker game is crooked. Yeah, but it's the only game in
town. There's No alternative available
for the bad guys. So if you want to sell drugs
online, it's cryptocurrency or nothing.
Yeah. It's value is, as the mechanism
of Last Resort, right? When you've when nothing else
can work, then, perhaps Bitcoin is the remaining choice and it's
kind of telling that for all the talk of Bitcoin as payment
system. The one case where you have a
potential huge Market because let's face it, the drug markets,
pretty darn big. You have proven successful ish
business models. It still hasn't taken over.
It's just so hard to use. Volatile it.
Just on that note, I think, unless there's anything else.
You'd like to add Nick? I think that'll probably do it.
Nope, sounds good to me. Okay, perfect.
We'll is wonderful to have you on.
Thank you for Cussing the assorted Tales of Silk Road.
It was a fun trip down memory lane there and please Celsius,
rename yourself psmt. It's such a better traditional
name for a Ponzi scheme. And that's going to do it for
season 1 of crypto critics Corner.
First off, I want to thank all of our listeners people have
reached out wanting to support us and everyone willing to have
a discussion. Instead of an argument, I
appreciate you. Thanks again.
Second of all, I want to thank my co-host my rock mr.
Bennett Tomlin, I never imagined doing a podcast would get almost
100,000 listens in less than a year.
I never imagined that Podcast with one of my best friends
would get 100,000 lessons in less than a year, but it has and
I am lucky and happy to have the opportunity to work with you.
Third. Thanks to all our guests.
We had an array of individuals from people, I never expected to
speak with two people who shared incredibly personal business
stories with us. It's amazing to get the chance
to listen to you. Lastly, and I know this is, A
little personal, but just over a year ago I lost my mom and to
say that I expected 2021 to be show is a euphemism.
I was wrong. I'm glad I was wrong and that
there were many people around me to lift me up.
I can thank my God. Mom my girlfriend, my podcast
co-host my editor at protoss. My best friends.
And more don't know what I'd do without you but everyone I can't
wait to see what 2022 brings and as the old Chinese blessing and
curse goes may we all lead interesting lives happy New Year
and remember stay skeptical friends.