I don't smoke anymore but back when I was at university I was a fucking cannabis connoisseur. The best bud, in my opinion, is totally organic stuff. That's made with no chemical ferts, just organic shit like worm castings etc. It was pretty difficult to get hold of, because artificially fertilized stuff grows bigger yields and is often a more potent smoke, but in terms of flavour the natural shit was second to none. A buddy of mine grew like that one year, it was NYC Diesel and he tenderly nurtured those plants like they were his children, and only used totally organic fertilizers. He even used to spend as much time as possible in the grow room, sitting there reading a book, in the belief that his lungs would manufacture more carbon dioxide for the plant.

His devotion really paid off. It was the best smoke I have ever had. When it was properly cured (another thing that most commercial growers don't bother with),the taste was phenomenal. Like an explosion of grapefruit, and the smoke was so smooth. Nothing else I have ever smoked came close. I've smoked way stronger weed, but it was strong enough, and nothing else has been as pleasurable. Even in Amsterdam nothing came close.

If you grow again then I recommend that route.

What in God's name are you talking about?

Who the fuck is going around irradiating pesticides? What a bizarre conjecture. Are you worried that weed growers use black market pesticides that was stored near Fukushima?

The reality is that weed growers take at least as much care over their crop as the farmer does with the wheat that goes into the bread you eat. In fact, they usually take much more care, because the crop is so valuable. They aren't growing it near dumps, or spraying radioactive pesticide on it. Think about it: if you had a plant that is worth $2000 if you grow it right, or nothing if you fuck it up, would you just grow it somewhere shitty and hope for the best?

The radioactive pesticide thing is nuts by the way, you couldn't even find radioactive pesticide if you were looking for them. I can't even begin to imagine what you were thinking with that one.

C'mon man, think before you type.

Hi Joel,

Me again.

It seems that this debate is largely academic.

I'm happy to agree that both Patrick and his investors are responsible for the loss of his investors coins.

Seems to me though:

Investor is responsible for the loss of coins, therefore the coins are lost. A hard lesson they need to swallow.

Patrick is also responsible for the loss of coins. However they weren't his coins. Therefore he should suffer some kind of loss.

Would you suggest then that Patrick should pay 50% of the coins back to be morally discharged from his obligation? Is that what you mean by both parties sharing responsibility?

Hi there.

Please be careful. Bitcoin in general is a very risky investment. It's a fairly new idea, and new ideas are always risky.

Don't buy graphics cards to mine with. You won't be able to even make a profit on that. Those days are gone, sadly.

BFL is risky. There are questions about whether it may be a scam. Even if you get your product it may take a long time to start making a profit. Alternatively it might take a few weeks and then you will be in profit. It's very hard to predict the future of Bitcoin mining. No one knows how much difficulty will go up as a result of ASICs. No one can really predict how much they will make, and how fast. Also, with BFL, no one can predict when exactly they will ship the product. No one even knows whether they are a scam or not!

There are a LOT of uncertainties. It's all a big risk for someone who is worrying about financial security.

Don't spend any money on anything Bitcoin related that you can't afford to lose. If you can afford to risk it all then it might be a good gamble, but at the moment you are on a roulette wheel. If you need the money to live, then keep it in your pocket. Wait until you have more disposable cash that you can afford to lose before you get involved in Bitcoin. Don't worry, it will still be here. The big gold rush is over anyway.

If you are desperate to get involved in Bitcoin, just buy some coins with whatever you can afford to risk. There are many people who think that buying coins now and waiting for them to rise in value is a better investment than mining equipment. That may or may not be true. The real advantage is that if you can risk as little or as much as you want. You don't have to spend a lot of money on mining equipment at once.

Be careful in general. Bitcoins are an incredible thing, and a lot of people have made some great money with them, but people have lost money too, through scams, hacks and god knows what else. Don't put all your eggs in the Bitcoin basket. It's a good basket, but it's a risky one. I don't have more money than I can afford to lose wrapped up in Bitcoin and neither should anyone else, in my opinion.

I hope this helped. Best wishes and good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Wow. Sounds like you have received some extremely juicy information. Do I understand you correctly that you have now decided to stop pursuing him yourself? If so, how do you feel about publishing the information? I find the whole Pirate saga fascinating, as many do, and I'd love to read about all this stuff. I dunno if you have an interest in entertaining the community, but if you do then you have an incredible opportunity to now do so.

If you'd like someone to write all the info up into an exciting story, I'd be happy to do that. Not that I am denigrating your writing skills, but I write for a living and I think I'd be able to craft something really fun to read out of this stuff.

No way. As if one of his buddies is going to call the IRS on him! You must live a very suspicious and lonely life.

Like what?

The part MPOE-PR quoted isn't AugustoCroppo's words, but it was AugustoCroppo's words that my comments were referring to. They can be read behind the link.

Do you honestly think he got away with money to warrant a safe deposit box? I feel like it's more likely "cigar box buried in the garden" money rather than "I'm renting a vault in Fort Knox" type of cash.

I dunno how it works in the US, but here in London safety deposit boxes aren't cheap! We're talking over £1000 a year for anything of a decent size. I have one myself but it's mainly for insurance reasons. I have a few items that would cost more to put on my home insurance policy than keep in the box. If I had lots of illegal cash that I couldn't insure anyway I'd probably just keep it in a locked drawer at home, especially if no one knew about it.

Yeah that sounds about right to me. I can't really imagine any other way he could get hold of it. He can't let it touch a bank account, at least not in any quantity.

Apparently that's how most of the Silk Road dealers cash out. They get a 500 euro bill in a birthday card on a daily basis.

I wonder if anyone here sells coins for cash like that on SR. The premium over Mt. Gox price is usually fairly large, so I'd imagine someone in the business of selling coin must have considered it.

If he actually does have a million dollars then he could easily do a lot of cool stuff with it without arousing suspicion. It would be a shame to have a million without being able to spend it on property or investments, but he could still do all the fun stuff, vacations, clothes, nights on the town, and pay his rent with it it as long as he can find a landlord who will accept cash (not difficult if you're happy to live in reasonably modest accommodation)

Of course he might also have a laundering strategy, who knows?

I think we will need to agree to disagree on this point. I think the moral responsibility rests on the person who makes the claim, not the person who believes it.



They were responsible for the decision they made, but why should you hold them responsible? Surely the loss of their coins is bad enough. And surely this thread is about holding Harnett to account?


I don't excuse anyone who risked other people's money either. They should also be held to account. Scammer tags applied, etc.

But what of those who risked their own money? Do they really need to be pilloried for making a stupid decision? Surely the man who lead them down that road should be the one blamed for what happened. The road lead to disaster, and they should both have foreseen that, but Harnett was the one walking ahead, saying "Follow me, follow me."

His carelessness was not mere personal carelessness. By being careless with other peoples money, he abused the trust that they placed in him.

You say you have no wish to absolve Harnett of responsibility, but when you say that both parties in this transaction are equally culpable for the loss of coins, then you paint the whole thing with a brush of moral ambiguity. When you say to the gentleman who has had his coins stolen "More fool you for believing him!" then you automatically absolve Harnett of at least some responsibility.

In my mind there is a victim and a culprit here. People lost a lot of coins so that Harnett could gamble with their money. I think that what he did was wrong and it was his responsibility to make sure he could do what he said he could before he claimed it. That's an issue of personal ethics and my moral compass, and as I said it's maybe something that we will have to disagree on.

No, but you can fault a party for making an impossible claim. If I lie to you, are you equally at fault if you believe it? Maybe you do believe that, but I don't. I think the liar bears the moral responsibility for lying. Maybe Harnett didn't deliberately set out to deceive anyone, but he made various untrue statements. He made the statements. He bears the responsibility for making them.


You speak as if this shared mistaken belief came out of nowhere. It came out of Harnett's mouth. Yes, it was a shared belief, but if Harnett didn't make the proposal then the deal wouldn't have been made. Harnett made various assurances. He assured the impossible. We can't blame him for not making good on his impossible claim, but we can fault him for making it in the first place surely?

Does anyone have a clear idea of how much he got away with?

I know that he owed $5m USD, but that included interest.

I have also heard that he took in $2m USD, but surely some of that must have been paid out in interest to people who withdrew.

Is there any chance he might have came out of this with a comparatively small profit? Or are we sure his scam made him a millionaire?

This should be a lesson to everyone that not only is Bitcoin incredibly easy to steal, but thefts actually have little to no legal recourse even if you know the precise identity of who stole your coins.

I dunno about a prize but he definitely deserves some kind of credit. Yes he wasn't the first, he wasn't the only one, but he was the most vocal and he suffered an extreme backlash from a large proportion of the community.

The funny thing is, some victims of Pirate are still calling him an asshole for trying to warn them.

It's bizarre that you are claiming that the fact he attempted to do the impossible somehow absolves him of some responsibility, or that the responsibility is shared.

It's his fault for trying to do the impossible, after all - he devised the whole ill-fated scheme!

The people who gave him money weren't doing so as part of a joint venture with him. That was not the deal. The deal was "Give me money and I will give you a fixed interest, and you can withdraw your principal at any time." and not "Invest with me and we will share risk and profit equally."

He broke the deal. It may have been unavoidable, but that doesn't matter. He was running a business. His depositors were his customers. He made an assurance to them and he broke it. The deal was never structured as a joint venture, it was never described as a joint venture, and it shouldn't be regarded now as a joint venture.

It couldn't be substantially similar. It's such a different situation.

In Operation Web Tryp, the people who were caught were operating registered businesses, taking credit cards, with websites hosted on the clearnet.

It would take maybe one day's detective work to find names and addresses.

Investigating Silk Road would take substantially longer, with a larger, more specialized team, a co-ordinated international effort, and no guarantee of convictions.

Why would they make life difficult for themselves when there are people who are easier to catch selling larger quantities of drugs?


If Silk Road ever became fucking huge, accounting for a substantial percentage of the drug trade, then yeah, they'd probably put enough men and enough money on it to find a way.

But as things stand, it just doesn't make sense.

I think a lot of people believe that large federal agencies are practically omnipotent, with infinite time, money and skill. They are well funded, but the fact is that they need to allocate their limited resources carefully in areas which will give them the maximum return. They can't piss away millions of dollars to find 15 kids who are selling a few ounces of drugs a month each when hundreds of kilos are traded every day outside Silk Road. Someone would lose their job over that type of resource misallocation.

I am sure that is not is the case, at least not for buyers.

I've never heard of anyone getting busted from using Silk Road. I also know many people personally who have ordered from Silk Road vendors with no issues.

I don't think it makes financial sense for the authorities to go after people who are buying small amounts of drugs for personal use. It would cost so much money to process cases, incarcerate people, police resources etc. Sure, if a police officer searches you and finds illegal drugs on you, they have a responsibility to arrest you and follow the legal channels, but are they going to mount a large and expensive operation in order to arrest and convict consumers? I highly doubt it.

The police have limited resources, and much bigger fish to fry. Like importers, distributors and dealers.

Is it a honey pot to trap dealers who wish to sell through the site? There would at least be some motive for doing that, but I am still skeptical. As I say, I know people who have ordered from Silk Road and received legitimate product, so at least some people must be selling drugs successfully through the site.

If you want a conspiracy theory, I think it's actually far more likely that Silk Road is being run by the CIA. They are no stranger to operating in the drug trade in order to fund their secretive operations.

Most likely though it's simply some guy who is very confident in his ability to use technology in order to keep himself anonymous. Bitcoin veterans will perhaps remember that the site didn't always take a commission from sales. I think possibly the original motivation was simply a political disagreement with drug prohibition, before he realized that he could make big money by taking a small vig on transactions.

Selling drugs on the internet isn't a new thing, but until Silk Road it was largely confined to cannabis. Previous sites processed payment with Liberty Reserve, Pecunix, and, when it was around, E-Gold. Any internet savvy potheads from 2004-2005 will recognize names such as Pepe, Budmonkey and Hermes the Hash Trader.  One of the biggest sites from this era, Budmail.biz, is still going strong. My personal belief is that it's run by a Canadian motorcycle gang.

The idea that drugs can be bought safely through the internet and delivered to your door is often greeted with skepticism, but it has been going on for a long time now. I wouldn't advise anyone to do it, but I wouldn't advise anyone to take drugs either, but more because they are extremely unhealthy rather than the level of risk involved in buying them from Silk Road.

 

What are your "specializations"? I know that lying to people on the internet that you are married when you are actually 100% alone is one of them. What are the others?

(Yes Augusto, I found out. Busted! Haha.)