Brian Doherty lauds the now-shuttered black market Silk Road as “pretty close to a perfect site in a perfect agorist anarcho-world”:
The anonymous folk running Silk Road professed they were on a mission to do more than make money. They were out to demonstrate something important about the combination of crypto and Bitcoin: that a world made by freely chosen, private, uncoerced transactions was possible and mostly beautiful. When asking people to support Silk Road, its operator Dread Pirate Roberts once wrote, “Do it for me, do it for yourself, do it for your families and friends, and do it for mankind.” They believed in the power of agorism-the variant of libertarianism that valorizes and promotes black markets as spaces where people can live in freedom, rather than struggling fruitlessly to change the political system.
It wasn’t just the people running Silk Road who saw something wholesome in the site. In a May working paper, David Decary-Hetu, a criminologist at the University of Lausanne, and Judith Aldridge, a law professor at the University of Manchester, pointed out that Silk Road-style drug sales drastically reduced the comparative advantage that credible threats of violence brought to a drug enterprise. Good communication, good customer service, and good product were now the keys to success, not muscle.
The Dish 