Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

I know you want to think that.

 

If this guy is involved in 6 murders then the sentence is pretty justifiable.

 

https://vault43.org/chart.php

of note, silk road only had about 13,000 listings by time of closure, though a few of those markets are down as of now--they still represent a collective doubling of Silk Road v1.0 (ignore the one that ended in scams).

And now there is open source software for creating decentralized bitcoin markets:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

basically anybody with a Github account can contribute and clone and run their own distributions to trivially start their own peer-to-peer anonymized marketplace. "anybody with a Github account" = ~99% of all programmers

Unless the government wants to attack and censor open source code run on American servers at its root (a near-suicidal proposition), that process isn't going to stop. The horse has long left the buggy.