I'm glad to see someone else thinking along those same lines. Unlikely, but the possibilities in this case are hilariously endless.
The odd thing is that it does raise some suspicions with Mt. Gox, the bitcoin theft, Silk Road, etc. As moyix points out below[1], Karpeles apparently registered silkroadmarket.org.
It's signed by "-Silk Road staff" at the bottom. If this site was really owned by Karpeles, then he definitely had something to do with Silk Road, whether or not he was DPR.
Browsing through other dates it was cached reveals that it was regularly updated with details about the SR registration being closed and server outages.
As far as I can tell, the downtime message [1] originated on silkroadmarket.org [2-6]. It doesn't look like Karpeles could have reposted it from somewhere else--he has to have been involved in the Silk Road's operations if he was behind the site.
It's also worth noting that DPR linked to silkroadmarket.org in his signature as the official way to get to site [7].
It's possible that Karpeles knew that a mainstream dark market that used bitcoin would increase the adoption of bitcoin. He may have tried to make that happen by registering the domain and promoting it.
true. this is like indicting twitter because someone posted criminal sites downtime notes.
remember that SR was probably 90% of the transactions, so they had lots of interest in "working" with it. maybe a more apt analogy would be PayPal posting notices about ebay having troubles (before one acquired the other) since it was the source of all transactions
> true. this is like indicting twitter because someone posted criminal sites downtime notes.
Defense attorneys specialize in shedding just enough doubt over the defendant's involvement that the jury won't reach a conviction. It doesn't always work (hence why trials sometimes seem so unpredictable to those of us watching from the outside), but when the burden of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt," any substantial doubt may be enough to convince the jury to acquit.
This trial could go either way. So it's fascinating to watch.
Kalyhost was one of the first (the first?) VPS provider to accept Bitcoins. If Ulbricht didn't want to pay for his server with a credit card, he probably would have ended up being a customer of Kalyhost and MtGox together.
Did he register silkroadmarket after the known existence of silk road? If so it could just be a domain squatting attempt for marketing purposes (e.g. "thinking of using silkroad? come first to mtgox, the best place to convert your $ to Btc".)
silkroadmarket.org was registered on February 28, 2011 [1]. According to a forum post [2], Silk Road was launched around three weeks before March 1, 2011.
And I guess that's the point; if you can create that doubt, even if it's ridiculous, in the minds of the people who are deciding Ulbricht's guilt or innocence then you've won.
The jury selection process is so skewed... hell, the juror creation process (growing up in the United States, watching hundreds or thousands of hours of cop/courtroom shows), that you can't make any reasonable predictions about what will happen.
There could indeed be real doubt, they'll convict anyway (I didn't like the way his eyes looked... all criminal-y).
> The jury selection process is so skewed... hell, the juror creation process (growing up in the United States, watching hundreds or thousands of hours of cop/courtroom shows), that you can't make any reasonable predictions about what will happen.
There's so much truth in this. If you're a US citizen reading this and have never served on a jury, I'd highly recommend not getting out of it. It'll shed a lot of light on the process, and you might be surprised.
> There could indeed be real doubt, they'll convict anyway (I didn't like the way his eyes looked... all criminal-y).
> There could be no doubt, but they'll acquit.
This reminds me of a trial I sat on. During deliberations, a couple of the women discussed how they didn't like the way the defendant would occasionally turn and look at them. They described him as "creepy." Given the circumstances, we were all convinced he was guilty, but we go caught up in a discussion about appearances for a while.
Yet we voted to acquit.
There were a number of reasons why we came to this conclusion, but the executive summary was essentially: Law enforcement mishandled evidence (without gloves!), key witnesses couldn't remember specific details of the defendant's involvement (3 years after the fact...), and 3 of the 4 expert witnesses were called by the defense--that should tell you something. Key pieces of evidence hadn't been admitted in the trial, either, and all we were left with was a couple of boxes of paraphernalia and a stack of photographs. The entire trial was messy.
I remember from the opening arguments thinking "Oh, this will be easy. Open-and-shut case, he'll probably be found guilty, and that's final." My mind completely changed in the first 30 minutes.
Aren't you really just saying that sometimes the juries get results that you wouldn't agree with? If you think something is "real doubt" and they don't, that's not an objective fact.
The odd thing is that it does raise some suspicions with Mt. Gox, the bitcoin theft, Silk Road, etc. As moyix points out below[1], Karpeles apparently registered silkroadmarket.org.
It's a strange little world.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896016