Topic: Genjix's opinion, split from: Bitcoinica MtGox account compromised (Read 869 times)

In your opinion, was hiring a hitman to kill the former employee justified - remembering that it was DPR himself who set up the deal in which the former employee was arrested?  If you're the one who fucked up and made your organisation vulnerable, is it "just" to kill someone else to avoid the potential consequences of your mistake?

That decision was clearly motivated by self interest, not some noble sounding bullshit about protecting others (DPR being taken down would have posed no risk to users if it had been as secure as he maintained).  If it had been solely about avoiding prosecution, there why continue operating the cash cow after a close call?

If someone tries to kill you to cover up their own mistake, is it "ethical" for you to co-operate with law enforcement in order to protect yourself?  Surely you also have the right to protect yourself by any and all possible means to counter the threat posed by someone trying to have you killed?

It's a little bit like the question of whether hackers are assholes or whether they're doing you a favour by exposing security flaws.  It's not a black and white issue.  It may well be worth "settling" with a single extortionist on your own terms in order to address a problem which poses a bigger and more ongoing threat to your operation.  It's not like you lose the option of killing the extortionist if the arrangement goes sour.

Both governments and organised crime have historically found ways to harness "the enemy" for their own advantage.  Doing that requires a level of organisational thinking which DPR didn't really display.  One of the flaws of SR being essentially a one man band was that it's policies were pretty much the whims of a single person and not necessarily the result of any meaningful strategic planning.

I honestly don't know whether DPR was simply too naive to realise that a marketplace like SR would inevitably develop some of the nastier characteristics which exist in the offline drug market.  Maybe he was so focused on seeing law enforcement as the only enemy that he really never considered the enemies within and how to deal with them.

Do you mean extortionist in general or extortionists in this particular instance?

SR had a pretty long history of vendors trying to extort money from their customers by threatening to release their information to law enforcement.  Typically, the approach taken to that was "name and shame".  The community would be made aware of the intimidation and the admins would demote/ban the vendor account.

From what I've been able to establish, FriendlyChemist was sketchy to start with.  He apparently sold precursors and processes and there are reports on the forums that the processes he sold were flawed.  In that respect, he hadn't been operating in good faith and that needs to be taken into account when considering what followed.

If someone whose background was not as sketchy as FriendlyChemist's had tried to extort money from DPR, one option might have been to give them a job.  FriendlyChemist had supposedly hacked the computer of another vendor and found their customer list.  Not retaining customer information was a cardinal rule of SR.  It may well have been worth paying FriendlyChemist to hack the computers of vendors in order to establish who was putting their customers at risk by retaining customer information.

Unfortunately, DPR's enforcement of the "don't keep customer information" rule was inconsistent.  In one case, he closed the account of a vendor who'd retained customer information but explicitly stated that they were welcome to open a new account - this inconsistency was probably motivated by greed (he likely wanted to continue receiving the commissions from their sales rather than having them go elsewhere).

In my opinion, if ruthlessness was warranted, it should have been deployed against vendors who retained customer information.  If someone can hack your computer and obtain your customer list then you are the one who has made those customers vulnerable to exposure - it's your mistake which is potentially life ruining for them.  The hacker is merely an opportunist capitalising on your wrong-doing.

You should always consider all your options before reacting and one of the first questions DPR should have asked himself was "can I somehow use this to my advantage"?  I believe that one of the reasons he did not was his belief that he'd successfully "eliminated" a previous threat to SR by having a former employee killed.

He should have packed up shop and walked away the moment that person was arrested, if only because the fact that deal went wrong clearly demonstrated that DPR's own judgement was flawed.  Once you have evidence that your judgement is flawed, it's foolish to continue relying on it to operate a criminal enterprise.

In this case it is a no-brainer.  Pack up shop and disappear.  If one cannot figure out how to vanish with $50M in BTC then it probably simply cannot be done.  One should never get oneself into a situation that they cannot walk away from.  At least not for love or money.

In the case of SR, it should have been clear from very early that the system was not defensible in perpetuity and from day one a lifeboat (or three) should have been maintained and provisioned.  Certainly it would be time to jump in it long before one starts to maim and kill one's adversaries.  Especially if it is pretty clearly going to simply buy at best some number of months of continued operation.

You'd think the fact that the fabled "emergency SR tumbler" turned out to be non-existent might be a tiny clue that DPR wasn't always entirely truthful with his fanbois, but it's amazing the extent to which people are torturing logic to maintain their belief that he was a martyr for some noble cause rather than a mercenary narcissist.

More than that, it's a pretty sure sign that they cannot be trusted and/or are completely unrealistic and unstable.  Anyone who believed that DPR would take a bullet for some random dopers on the net got themselves into a seriously unstable frame of mind.  I don't know what DPR said about anything and was unaware of his cult following since I never paid much attention to SR, but if he implied that he was going to take a fall for either some principle or some group of people, and people believed him, then they must have either been pretty young or pretty messed up from the drugs.

What's the correct way to deal with a former employee getting arrested?  That's when the first hit was ordered - ordered because he assumed the former employee would "sing" (he actually uses that term in his message).

Should employees expect to be killed if arrested by police in relation to a deal which was organised by their boss?  If so, then shouldn't the boss be equally prepared to die to protect the secrets of Silk Road and have some kind of "suicide pill" at his disposal?

Nobody knows you're a dog on the internet.  A lot of people drank the DPR kool-aid - he said things they wanted to hear and that made them believe that they "knew" him.  SR was a cult of personality as well as a marketplace, and that was its fatal flaw.  Just because someone says they're willing to die or spend their life in prison for a cause doesn't mean it's the truth.

Another option: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqw0Gz9GahM

I, for one, found the comment in question to be spot-on.  It was quite similar to what I felt also, and I had previously had some modicum of respect for the guy.

I don't know why we are talking about the government here at all. There are hundreds of different governments around the world, some really nice, some really not nice. It doesn't really matter the reason why you would have someone killed, the fact that you would is the problem for me. The hypothetical "lives would be ruined" doesn't count because it's not like those people would die because of this information being revealed, it's more like, "lots of people would have to be very uncomfortable at confronting the people they actively lie to every day and be forced to tell the truth". Who's to say that having been 'outed' they might get help for their drug addiction? Losing your job might suck incredibly much, especially with a family to support, but losing your life isn't even comparable.

Anyway, it wasn't nice of me to make the post personal and I apologise for that. I just got a bit worked up (reasonably so) at the idea of people on the forums here advocating killing people because they thought it was justified. If you want to bring up the government, just think of all the times the government justifies doing it. If it's not right when they do it, it's not right when anyone does it.

Uhm, did you forget how many millions of people were killed by their own governments during the last century?

What does the relationship of the aggressor have to do with it anyway? Someone chooses to blackmail you to release info that may ruin yours and thousands of other peaceful people's lives. What are you going to do?

Because the gubbernment doesn't order hits on ex-employees (at least not as easily detectable).

Simple, if you choose to threaten people you are an aggressor and can expect a blowback.

Why is it that most people don't see moral problems when their government blows up so-called terrorists, but do so if a peaceful person defends himself?

So turns out OP isn't such a nice guy after all.


Yeah, the same guy who I was feeling sorry about for having to get stuck sorting out the Bitconica mess is totally fine with murdering people to cover others criminal activity.