Here's the part I don't understand:

* A user friendlychemist threatens DPR.

* DPR asks friendlychemist to refer his "supplier" to DPR.

* redandwhite says he was "asked to contatct" DPR by friendlychemist and friendlychemist owes redandwhite money

* DPR asks for a hit from redandwhite on friendlychemist

That makes zero sense to me. Why would you assume those two users are not the same person or aren't at least allies?

* DPR was ready to pay friendlychemist upto $150K

* BUT DPR was also afraid it'd lead to more extortion

* DPR knew redandwhite was same as friendlychemist or an associate of his

Based on these assumptions, DPR's move to pay redandwhite was really DPR paying friendlychemist while also communicating the length to which he is willing to go to deal with extortionists. So by going the path he went, he paid off friendlychemist and scared him at the same time.

The guy he tried to have killed could show up and testify on his behalf and a reasonable jury might still find him guilty.

Absurd.

I think we can all see at this point that Ulbricht got played. But that doesn't exculpate him. (Not that it matters yet; he hasn't been charged with the attempted murder).

Toy version of the conversation.

FC: Give me money so I can pay my debts. DP: Lemme talk to your creditor. RW: I'm FC's creditor, whats up. DP: I don't owe FC money. Rather I want him dead. Can you do this. RW: Sure. $250k. DP: I normally pay 80k to kill people. Split the difference?

... uh. wtf? The whole exchange really makes no sense, unless you assume that DPR knew he was talking to the same guy all along and was working on terms that would make the guy not bother him by scaring him off.

Edit: Nevermind! Apparently the 80k "hit" wasn't just a negotiation technique: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bal-sil...

Sounds like the guy was a petty criminal who wasn't as smart as he should have been if he wanted to run an underground market for criminal activity.

And anybody else who thought they would try and blackmail money out him. It seems completely plausible scenario and kills two birds with one stone. No pun intended.

Along with five other countries.

  Although I believe the foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit
  a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who 
  have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to 
  redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any 
  record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about 
  March 31, 2013.

    32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's
    intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with
    Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of
    there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to
    redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire.
    Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White
    Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"

EDIT: Or he was watching too much breaking bad and beginning to assume Heisenberg's characteristics after feeling invincible for earning $80MM

However, he went too far into his fantasy, and not too smartly, and he'll pay for it.

I just put in two spaces like the formatting guide said. But the whole thing ended being one line.

    So a paragraph that would run off the page and break mobile devices in normal circumstances should be broken in several places by a hard 'return' plus more spaces. 

    Is really just a collection of sentence fragments
    that all fit the same formatting. There might be 
    a better way, but I don't know it!

    So a paragraph that would run off the page and break mobile
    devices in normal circumstances should be broken in several
    places by a hard 'return' plus more spaces.

    Is really just a collection of sentence fragments that all
    fit the same formatting. There might be a better way, but I
    don't know it!

Shift-v starts line-by-line visual mode.

Ctrl-v starts visual column mode(which is both very cool and very useful)

set mouse=a

Or startline,endline command: 10,20d

> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"

Or an angle bracket, with an opening and closing asterisk.

> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"

This means you don't need to include any line breaks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6484074

http://blockchain.info/en/tx/4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad...

Almost an analog for "Walter White," who also made $80mm on his calamitous journey from "honest" meth-cooker to kingpin.

Payed off anyways but at the same time negotiated a discount and scared the guy into not trying it again.

This is corroborated by the fact that the FBI knew the name, date and city yet couldn't match it up to a real body.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-s...

  Oct 2 (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement authorities raided
  an Internet site that served as a marketplace for illegal
  drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and arrested its
  owner, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday.

  The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread
  Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to 
  court filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with 
  one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, 
  computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering 
  conspiracy, according to a court filing.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric...

There's some interesting stuff in there, page 21 is the murder for hire scenario and 24 is where the agent explains how they identified DPR.

1. Canadian spies set up "FriendlyChemist", hack into another vendor and get extortion material on DPR

2. "FriendlyChemist" tells "RedandWhite" (obviously the same person/agency) to contact DPR

3. "RedAndWhite" extorts American based DPR to pay for a murder that mysteriously does not happen in Canada

4. DPR then (stupidly?) pays "RedAndWhite" for fake ID documents from Canada, which mysteriously get stopped at the border

5. US agency arrests DPR on delivery of Fake ID's

6. There is no chance of entrapment since:

- Based on the Nature of TOR, we can never prove that "FriendlyChemist/RedAndWhite" are a police force (karma)

- They are most likely not a domestic force, but were working covertly with US agencies (cannot be subpoenaed). </pre>

Certain government authorities know you're acquainted with someone who's previously been fingered for murder-for-hire but never convicted.

The "authorities" call you and threaten to murder your family; you naturally seek back-up from your erstwhile acquaintance. The police ensure they give you just enough information to track their threat back to a "person" of their construction.

Boom. You're up on a rap of "conspiracy to commit first degree murder" (or whatever it's actually called in your jurisdiction).

Doesn't seem so impossibly far-fetched does it?

They'll stack the charges so high you a helicopter to see over 'em. He'll either plead it out and get fifty or fight it and get life. His choice.

If the federales have all of his assets, he ain't fighting nothing.

The police couldn't find a record of the alleged murder victim, so I'm guessing that "redandwhite" and "friendlychemist" were the same person, just playing a con on DPR to get some cash.

I took it to mean fast and relatively painless versus protracted suffering, i.e. "non-clean", messy.

Without the 'respectively', it's ambiguous whether the clean or non-clean were the cheaper of the two alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Guerin#Murder

Clean: Traffic accident, apparent suicide, etc.

You'd probably create more evidence trying to make it look like an accident than you'd clear up just by doing it some easier way.

That would be hazardous in my opinion. Now you have two places where you can place the preparator.

However, what I am surprised by is the fact that there wasn't really any focus on his facilitation of arms trafficking. I would imagine that those activities are more likely to cause actual harm to society that we should be worried about.

He paid someone to kill an extortionist that had threatened to release incriminating info on a lot of users. As far as the law goes it's the same as him killing his child's first grade teacher over a bad grade but when you extort someone operating a drug dealing network, what do you expect?

After going to Penn St for a grad degree in materials science,

    "Ulbrecht states that his 'goals' subsequently 'shifted'.  Ulbricht
    elaborates, obliquely, that he has since focused on "creating an 
    "economic simulation" designed to "give people a first-hand experience
    of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of
    force" by "institutions and governments."

Edit: but I'm waiting and reading with an open mind.

The way this works is that they take their own favorite definition of personal property, and then re-define the word "aggression" as: "anything that violates my definition of personal property, and nothing else".

So, when a land owner shoots somebody who mis-stepped onto his land without warning, that is not aggression according to libertarians - if you really take them seriously.

Obviously, when you point that out to a libertarian, an endless game of shifting definition starts, much like how many discussions about the existence of god go with theists.

If you're interested in a well-argued and entertainingly written outsiders' perspective on this, I recommend Matt Bruenig. Here's a starting point: http://www.demos.org/blog/8/21/13/fun-times-libertarianism

I do think it nonetheless ends up pretty entangled in the ideas invented by the modern centralized state, especially the ideas of "property ownership" and "a contract", which are supposed to exist in a sort of ethereal global-variable state separate from any facts in the physical world or local interactions. The modern state enables that fiction by maintaining a central property register backed by a cadastral survey, and a set of courts that enforce the abstract idea of a contract. Minarchists are perhaps more open about this dependence than anarcho-capitalists are, by just directly asserting that the state should exist solely to operate and enforce a property register and contract law.

I agree that it's a baffling world view though.

And it's not as if libertarians are entirely crazy. It's healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards authority. But it's also healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards market solutions. As usual, the best answer(s) are somewhere in compromise and in the middle.

I guess that ideas like the "non-aggression principle" are so alluring to some because they have a sort of superficial "intellectual purity" which that kind of compromising answer lacks.

And I thought the journalist that got his laptop seized at an airport was harshly treated...

I'm not sure of the details of this situation but just following libertarian legal reasoning there may be another way to justify it. The logically consistent libertarian position on abortion is neither pro-choice nor pro-life. Block's theory of evictionism is basically that a mother's right to remove a fetus is stronger than the fetus' right to be in the womb, yet the mother is not permitted to kill the fetus straight off exactly.

If there was developed some technology such as a pig fetus used to carry the child to term then that technology would have to be employed. Would there be some other reliably effective means to stop this snitch besides killing him?

If you are simply arguing the most utilitarian point of view for the sum of the actors involved, surely paying him off is the most moral thing to do. $300K to prevent 10,000+ years of jail and shankings versus killing someone. $300k is much less than the life of one person.

Isn't the real threat the 3rd party that would be doing the jailing? Why is freely communicating what some people did a grounds for murder? He's not the one that is doing the locking people up -- it just so happens to be more convenient to murder him then to take on the justice system. Convenience does not make it the moral course of action.

I adore libertarians, I really do, for all the energy and earnestness they bring to their theory of government. But I can't take them very seriously, and this sort of thing is exactly why.