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Comment by benguild | Hacker News Reader

Truth. It’s like how ridiculous shutting down Napster was.

However, it does set a precedent for future things of this nature. For example, shutting down Megaupload caused a lot of other file-sharing websites to shutdown or clean up their act for fear of a larger crackdown. If anyone thinks they can just run a website like Silk Road and get away with it longterm for the sake of just being a middleman (like the file-sharing networks were), it’s now been demonstrated what kind of attention that will raise.

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Shutting down Megaupload also caused a lot of people to move back to torrents. At that time, direct download websites were quite trendy and most of the trafic was redirected to torrents after.

Good point... this trial will not stop anything, just the nature of how things move forward from here... Perhaps in the future, these markets will be even more decentralized, like torrents have changed sharing sites. There is now a huge incentive to run these markets from places like Russia or Mexico.

"This trial will not stop anything" may or may not be true, but the trial is also about bringing justice for what was done, and punish for the crime that was committed. If a murder was committed, a trial may not stop future murders, but surely you agree that we must bring the murderer to trial. By selling drugs and conspiring to murder, Ulbricht must stand trial, even if there will be another drug dealer tomorrow.

This is an interesting perspective on just "how much of a crime" that was:

http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-...

I haven't followed this too closely, and maybe he is guilty of attempting to murder people and such, but it does look like the government/judge wanted to punish him with a life sentence mostly for the the fact that he created a "drug market outside the reach of the law" (or whatever).

Ars covered this much better than did Wired [1]. That's what you want to read to get a decent picture of the factors that went into his sentence (assuming you don't get a copy of the court transcript and read that).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sente...

If we follow that logic there are a few large players that are missing from your line of thought-

Ulbrich is a small fish in huge pond when compared to the large unnamed players who get of with small reprimands and fines.

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-...

Those charts on the Economist showing how new markets fill the empty space left by Silk Road are very similar to some charts from a recent EU study on piracy:

https://torrentfreak.com/shutting-down-pirate-sites-is-ineff...

Short of somehow controlling the creation of these "services" in the first place (rather than trying to block them after the fact), it doesn't look like they can be stopped as long as the demand is there.

Uhm no what caused problems was Visa/Mastercard/Paypal stopping payment processing for filehosting site (even ones that were "clean" )

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