In a rare interview with Forbes magazine published on Wednesday, the current operator of Silk Road – who goes only by the handle “The Dread Pirate Roberts” and says he isn’t actually the service’s founder – said Silk Road and the underground #bitcoin economy are as much about disrupting the global status quo as they are about illicit trade.
“What we’re doing isn’t about scoring drugs or ’sticking it to the man.’ It’s about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we’ve done no wrong,” Roberts told the magazine. “Silk Road is a vehicle for that message. All else is secondary.”
But not every Bitcoin trader sympathizes with Roberts’s lofty political ideals, and US law enforcement definitely does not agree that participants in the Bitcoin economy have done no wrong.
▻http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/14/us_senate_bitcoin_probe