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The first possibility was the easiest: to simply pay a visit to Green at his home in Spanish Fork,
Utah, and scare him into returning the money he had stolen. The second was more difficult—but
definitely more just—and involved beating Green for his unscrupulous treason. Maybe one of DPR’s
guys would bind Green to a chair, slap him around a bit, break a few fingers, a nose, threaten his
family, and scare him into returning that money. But there was a problem with both of these choices: If
word got out that it was okay to sing to the cops and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,
the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t be the most feared pirate sailing the Dark Web, but rather a
weakling pushover. The Silk Road would be known as a place where you could break the rules
without reprisal.
This led to the third option for Green: killing him.
Decisions, decisions.
How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher.
You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean
clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black
curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call you back. Then an idea hits you. It starts as
just a thought, like a kid’s daydream of a giant invention. But once it becomes lodged there in your
mind, it won’t go away. Then something happens, like a bolt of lightning striking a kite, or mold
accidentally contaminating an experiment, and you realize this idea is actually possible. You type
lines of code into your computer and out comes a world that didn’t exist before. There are no laws
here, except your laws. You decide who is given power and who is not. And then you wake up one
morning and you’re not you anymore; you’re one of the most notorious drug dealers alive. And now
you’re deciding if someone should live or die. You’re the judge in your own court. You’re God.
But God wasn’t ready to end another man’s life. At least not yet. So he issued a directive to Nob
to go off and find Green and have him roughed up.
“I’d like him beat up. Then force him to send the Bitcoins he stole back,” DPR wrote to Nob.
“Like sit him down at his computer and make him do it.” He then reiterated to Nob that getting the
money back “would be amazing.”
Nob said he would send his guys to Utah to do just that.
But while Nob had set off to find Green, and Ross had issued a pardon of sorts, he still wasn’t
sure this level of amnesty was the right decision. How could he let someone steal that much money
from DPR and get away with a measly beating? The conundrum lay in the reality that violence was
not something Ross was used to, though it was something he believed in when absolutely necessary.
Back at Penn State, a short lifetime ago, while sitting in the Willard Building off Pollock Road,
Ross had defended this very topic with Alex and his friends in the College Libertarians Club.
“Yes, but the use of force is completely justified if you have to defend your own rights or
personal property,” young Ross had argued while discussing one of the latest Murray Rothbard books
he had devoured. Back then it had just been idealistic, hypothetical banter by a group of college
students. The conversation had even followed some of the club members to the Corner Room bar on
College Avenue, where, amid the sound of sports talk and the clink of pints of Samuel Adams, they
had discussed Rothbard’s War, Peace, and the State, which explained why you could use violence
against any “individual criminal” trying to harm you or steal your personal property.
Now, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, the more Ross thought about it, the more he wondered if
beating Green up would be enough of a punishment to deter others on the site from betrayal. He