(Maybe you could have just hammered it continuously, but hopefully would have to predict when the blocks would be confirmed. They’re not exactly every 10 minutes).

It’s not exactly related to this hack, but poor blockchain practice on the part of silk road if it permitted withdraws this quick after deposits.

Not waiting for confirmations would leave you vulnerable to random chain forks and make 51% attacks cheaper.

Also common in professionally coded websites.

No. The guy he "wanted to kill" was a moderator who didn't even steal from him. A FBI agent (huray, my taxes) pretended to be a drug lord for over 2yrs convincing Ross he should kill some moderator with lies about he wanting to take over silkroad or something, and then staged a mock assassination. All that for no tangible investigative benefit other then strengthen their 2yr old bro-bond.

That agent didn't even contribute to the actual arrest. Go read wired write up of the whole thing. It's better than most fiction books. Pure comedy.

Also, the current silk road is a honeypot set up by the Feds. That's why 1) they screwed up on validating transactions (it's not their money) and 2) they want after the stolen funds.

The DOJ release says these transactions were from 2012

You can provide a billion examples of how the US hasn't lived up to that notion, but 'liberty and justice for all' is, "what's on the tin."

Wouldn't the balance of the child's needs change the ethical judgement (now considered ethical as well as effective)? I don't see how they would be mutually exclusive.

Trivia aside, no. Entrapment is a specific concept narrower than "a fed lied to me."

Yes, no kidding it's a more complicated subject than that one short sentence. But my point was just that it's different from any notion of entrapment, or lack of, in the US.

Ross Ulbricht commissioned 5 murders fully expecting each of them to be carried out.

> All that for no tangible investigative benefit other then strengthen their 2yr old bro-bond.

The murder-for-hire evidence denied him bail. But the prosecutor already had Ulbricht nailed and decided to avoid complicating the case by formally filing the murder-for-hire charges. Would your tax dollars have been better used if Mr. Ulbricht had additional life sentences and decades of prison? No, he is going to die in a prison cell either way.

Ross Ulbricht built his empire, in large part, by profiting off people's suffering. And he exhibited time and time again that he would murder people to protect it. He is nothing short of evil.

There are different levels of proof. For example, civil court only requires a preponderance of evidence.

Exactly. Justice does not exist at that level of wealth, and this is a core problem in western society.

Well pointed out.

Are there any societies, historical or current, where the extremely rich and powerful face justice in the way you would like, other than by pissing off other extremely rich and powerful people?

For example, in the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, two people were sentenced to death and three received life sentences.

So what? Which is it, are you in favor of a lighter sentence for Ulbricht, or a heavier sentence for the Sackler family?

I see this "comparison" form of objection quite a bit, where someone points out relative injustice without taking a stand on which way to go. Once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere.

In terms of conversation, it almost always seems to have a muting effect, of freezing the momentum towards figuring out what should be done. Desiring consistency is honorable, but these sorts of scenarios further ask us which way we want to apply that consistency. While each individual case probably wouldn't make a difference, I think when we refuse to answer those questions as a society, it makes it more likely for these imbalances to occur. So I think it's worthwhile to try and think it through, take a stand, and voice a stand.

The US government really should have went the extra mile and stripped the Sackler family of every penny they had.. to the point that they were forced to beg for spare change on the side of the road e.g. Mortimer & Randolph Duke style.

> The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/health/purdue-sacklers-op...

He built Silk Road, which allowed people to sell drugs to one another.

If the 'people's suffering' you are referencing is the use of drugs, I hope you have this same ire for the pharmaceutical companies and physicians prescribing opioids linked to over 500k deaths in the US over the past two decades[1]. I hope you feel the same ire for the CIA who facilitated and supported the Nicaraguan Contra groups' smuggling of crack into the US to finance their coup attempt[2].

I would hope the "nothing short of evil" rhetoric isn't exclusively saved for the kid who built an onion site and then was entrapped by FBI agents into a murder-for-hire scheme of their creation.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2022/11/02/1133523740/cvs-health-agrees-... [2]https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/north06.pdf

> He built Silk Road, which allowed people to sell drugs to one another.

Actually, that's the tiniest part. [1]

  The Silk Road was an online black market where buyers and sellers of illegal or
  unethical items could transact anonymously. Utilizing privacy techniques such
  as the Tor network and cryptocurrency transactions, people were able to
  transact in drugs, hacked passwords, illegal data, and other contraband.

  MANY OF THE ideological supporters of the Silk Road have described its
  sprawling online black market for drugs as an experiment in victimless crime
  and a nonviolent alternative to the bloody turf wars of the streets. But
  prosecutors in the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old accused of running
  that anonymous bazaar, have pointed to one conversation they say shows the
  contrary: That the Silk Road's boss was willing to resort to the drug trade's
  most violent measures when it suited his needs.

[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...

LOL. Wow. You clearly have no sense for nuance whatsoever.

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/silk-road-study/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/did-s...

Silk Road reduced deaths in a black market that was always there and would always continue to be there regardless of the presence of Silk Road. Period. Given that black markets are going to continue to exist, since anti-drug laws are dumb (just like Prohibition was; regulation of an irrepressible market is always superior to "illegalization" in a vain attempt to suppress it), it is at least less bad if there are fewer killings.

Entrapment is unethical precisely because you can use it to enforce a law regardless of the ethical justification of the law. If it was a capital offense to have sex before marriage in 2040 in the United Christian Dictatorship of America, and another Ross Ulbricht type came along and made it possible for teens to seek and meet in secret online, and a christo-fascist cop pretended to be a hot girl on said system while pretending to threaten to take the whole thing down unless a ransom was paid, and ANOTHER christo-fascist cop (or the same one pretending to be someone else) offered a "solution" to this by "getting rid of" the "problem"... Do you see where I'm going with this? Future Ross Ulbricht just wanted people to be able to find physical love before committing to wed!! Certainly not guilty enough to do life in prison, because no actual murders ever actually occurred.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220112152207/https://www.wired...

"oh wait we fucked something up? shit no, give me my money back"

One morning I put 20p in and it immediately came back out. It wasn’t accepting the coin so I tried two in quick succession. Both were spat back out… but the machine registered one of them.

I of course would never exploit that repeatedly for a couple free drinks and some extra change too.

The new machines use either a basket to hold the drink instead of a conveyor belt or some sort of shield to prevent you from messing with the flap door until it knows a drink has been vended.

Now, I don't know for sure, but I like to think two different reviewers got my packets in parallel and never knew it, and upon changing my status the second reviewer probably wouldn't have seen any evidence of the last status change having been from an appeal.

Back in the days before email was common, I applied for a postdoc position at <famous prof's lab @ MIT>.

I mailed my letter to <famous prof>, expressing interest in working in his lab.

A few days later, I asked 3 profs in my graduate program to write letters of recommendation on my behalf to be mailed to <famous prof>.

After ~10 days, I received a response letter from <famous prof>, to the effect of: "Sorry, my lab is full. Won't have any openings for several years. etc. etc. Thanks, but no thanks."

I figured "Oh well.... No big deal."

But I was too lazy to inform the profs who were writing my recommendations to stop.

About a week after my "rejection" letter, <famous prof> phones me and says, "I always send a standard rejection letter because I'm only interested in people who are _aggressive_. Thanks for sending your recommendation letters. I _definitely_ have openings in my lab."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that he only got those letters because of my laziness.

Back in the early 1990s, I withdrew $10 from an ATM.

But the machine gave me two $10s (they were stuck to each other).

I then went back for a second transaction (secretly hoping there were multiple "stuck $10s" waiting to be released).

The machine only dispensed a single $10 the second time, so I stopped.

Let it be known that I owe Chemical Bank (or whoever bought them) $10 + interest.

At the time, my girlfriend (now wife) used to tell me I wasted so much $$ on ATM fees by only withdrawing $10 at a shot.

I told her I was not good at budgeting my money and I had a tendency to spend whatever was in my pocket, irrespective of the amount.

So, $10 was my way of putting brakes on my spending. Fees were just part of the cost of my budgeting method.

She married me anyway.

Back when ATMs were new, you could get any amount, including change.

The ATMs at the Chase bank next door currently dispense any bills you want, but not change. After you tell it how much you want, it asks you how you would like it and you can tap different denominations.

Last month I took out $17, just to see it work.

He could withdraw whatever amount he wanted from the ATMs at college, but since that region's ATM network wasn't hooked up to his home bank's ATM network, it took months for everything to reconcile.

He could keep withdrawing, even if he had taken out far more cash than he had in his home bank account.

On breaks, he would go back home and pick up enough hours at his part-time job to cover the difference (it wasn't unusual for people to be paid weekly or in cash back then), make a deposit, and everything was fine. He just had to keep one step ahead of the computer batch processes.

Also, I think Chemical is Citibank now. I had a Chemical account, and a Dime account. I still think of Citi as "Chemical," though.

> So Silk Road wasn’t waiting for any transaction confirmations??? And didn’t append a nonce to each withdrawal to avoid duplicates?

See the ACID properties of databases. [1] These are often put to the wayside in order to have greater transaction speed. We can see the results.

  In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a
  set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity
  despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.[1] In the context of
  databases, a sequence of database operations that satisfies the ACID properties
  (which can be perceived as a single logical operation on the data) is called a
  transaction. For example, a transfer of funds from one bank account to another,
  even involving multiple changes such as debiting one account and crediting
  another, is a single transaction.

But since this is "blockchain", is it more like... they weren't polling for the right confirmation/status/update from the blockchain network API thingie?

That's the exact same mistake I referenced. The consuming website should not be in charge of the atomicity of transactions.

It doesn't matter whether the API was used incorrectly, blockchain was used, or finanglesperunk was the technology. The vagaries of the implementation don't matter. Sending money should be atomic with the request instead of whatever this was. The $3.36 Billion in theft should tell you that.

PS Blockchain is a database. You can choose to enforce SALT instead of ACID, but $3.36 Billion should tell you that people aren't doing something right.

ACID makes sense in internal transfer, like the example you gave:

> debiting one account and crediting another, is a single transaction.

Blockchain is ACID compliant, their internal database could be ACID compliant hard part is linking it together.

That's the issue, ACID is not ACID for a tiny bit but for the transaction. See the definition you quoted, "debiting one account and crediting another, is a single transaction." Blockchain is absolutely not ACID compliant. There must be a deterministic methodology not miner consensus for ACID. Miners can even change the blockchain.

However, why are you even mentioning blockchain instead of MYSQL without SERIALIZABLE, which enforces atomicity?

> The solution here is exactly going opposite of ACID.

What solution are you talking about? There was no solution put in place, which was the cause of the thefts.