For What It’s Worth: A Review of Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” | Hacker News Reader

For What It’s Worth: A Review of Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin”

dancohen.org

178 pointstintinnabula84 comments

> This is like someone having the scepter of an Egyptian king

The point of a scepter is that you can wave it around in front of your subjects, not leave it in a vault somewhere all the time. It's more like the actual grave goods the Egyptian kings were buried with, maybe.

> Sol LeWitt is an unusual artist in that he rarely painted, drew, or sculpted the art you see by him. Instead, he wrote out instructions for artwork, and then left it to “constructors”—often art students, museum curators, or others, to do the actual work of fabrication. LeWitt liked to be a recipe writer, not a chef.

So. Algorithmic art, except executed by humans instead of the traditional computer. "calculate z_{n+1} = z_n²+1 for each point repeatedly; color it black if it converges..."

What makes LeWitt interesting is the ambiguity in his instructions. Give the instructions to 100 different groups and you'll get 100 different works with no way of knowing which, if any, match what LeWitt had in mind. "calculate z_{n+1} = z_n²+1..." on the other hand will always give the same result no matter who implements it.

I think you would need some randomisation in there to simulate a Sol LeWitt. The Mandelbroit set is (very) complex but deterministic.

In France we have a legal definition of what constitutes an original work of art. For instance you can produce up to 8 original copies of a sculpture, that's art. Wanna sell 9 copies, you're no longer an artist but an artisan. That also applies to furniture, I couldn't track down what the actual law says, there are many exemptions and edge cases but basically that's the idea.

Here, this album fits the criteria for being numbered 1/1.

So, music or film aren't considered art in France?

Well, the actual disk you buy in the store, no, that's mass production. Nonetheless music, movies, books are still covered by intellectual property laws and considered as intellectual works, but yeah that's not legally art.

The laws I was referencing in my first comment are more concerned about what is sold in an art gallery. A limited edition album would have its place there (even if it's a terrible one), not an album from Prince that sold millions of copies even if the later is socially recognised as a piece of art.

That must be in the caveats, music, films, writing, code, all that is "conceptual" in nature...

Of all the people that could have bought this album, the fact that it was Martin Shkreli continues to amaze me.

From being in the game collecting scene where I've witnessed people spending tens of thousands of dollars to own the single copy of specific unreleased games/prototypes for the sole purpose of ensuring that no one else can ever play the games but them, and even drafting sales contracts when selling these games for massive profits that the next owner is not allowed to distribute the game either ... I can say that Martin Shkreli is exactly the kind of person I'd expect to have bought this album =(

What amazes me is the number of people who dislike Martin Shkreli...most of who can't even tell me why.

If you're trying to troll on the sly you'll need to be a bit more subtle than that. I'd suggest most people who dislike Shkreli know that he massively jacked up the price of a drug that there were no legal alternatives to, even if they don't know or can't remember the exact details. For those that want to learn more, search online for daraprim.

EDIT: alex95, your comment is flagged as dead, many people reading this won't see it. I know the excuses Skreli gave, about using the revenue to fund new drugs, but I don't buy it, and the reason I don't buy it is because he jacked up the price so much he was putting the life of some people in danger. That doesn't strike me as a move someone who cared about improving healthcare would make.

AFAIK the drug was free for everyone without insurance, so the only ones who felt the actual price increase were the insurance companies. Am I wrong or there really is some merit to Shkrelis explanations?

The that only insurance companies felt the price is an audacious lie by Shkreli and his people. Documents that were subpoenaed for the congress hearing revealed that people with insurance got stuck with 30%-50% co-pays. At 75.000 a bottle a 40% co-pay is still a 30.000 out of pocket expense. Regular people have to remortgage their house to come up with this kind of money.

Shkreli basically lied about everything. He lied about his business model. He lied about the availability of the drugs. He lied about his programs that supposedly made the drug available to people who could not otherwise afford it. The guy is a real piece of work.

Watch the hearing on C-SPAN if you don't believe me.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?404183-1/hearing-prescription-d... http://www.c-span.org/video/?406885-1/sudden-price-spikes-de...

Found the timestamp, starts at 00:41:00 (second hearing) where victims of Martin Shkreli talks about their attempts to mortgage their house in order to pay for the drug for their sick child.

Is he lying about doing drug research? He says no one else was doing anything for this disease as it is so rare. Seeing how old the drug is and no one else is even making it seems to prove that part of the claim.

Are there proofs of the availability program but working outside this video? Seems like news people should document such cases and bring them up. Even better if they'd do so live on his webcam.

What he called drug research was in reality drug acquisition/market research. His spiel about his intention to do real research to improve abandoned drugs is intentionally unfalsifiable because it's about FUTURE research he promises to do, you know, some years down the road. We're supposed to take his word for it and meanwhile he makes his billions.

The reality is that all the executives at Turing were his hedge fund buddies, the investors were other hedge fund buddies and Shkreli made nearly a billion dollars in 3 years with his price-hiking shenanigans. In investor presentations he doesn't even refer to Turing as a pharma business nor does he talk about his planned pharmaceutical research, he presented the business as a pharma-hedgefund-hybrid: an easy way to make boatloads of money.

This isn't what you'd expect to see from somebody who is passionate about drug research and curing kids, this is what you expect to see from somebody who cynically exploits a system. That internal correspondence (again, subpoenaed) shows they're like "lol, sucker" whenever an individual pays the list price for their drugs makes it crystal clear how concerned they are about providing a service to humanity.

See e.g. http://democrats.oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversig... for some nice quotes

> "Is he lying about doing drug research?"

I would say so, yes. Note how none of the products that they're supposedly developing are in clinical trials, despite being Turing Pharmaceuticals indicating they should be...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2015/12/15/martin-...

Where's your evidence for these high co-pays that Turing did not subsidize? I searched both transcripts for "co-pay" and "mortgage," and didn't find anything like what you're claiming. In fact, I see the opposite. I see the CEO of Turing being cross-examined by a hostile Massachusetts congressman accusing her of causing $6000 co-pays. She says, no, we paid anyone directly who fell through the cracks in this way. He replies, "after 4 days."

Searching for the word "mortgage" yielded no results for me.

I used to think drug companies were a scourge. After researching the Shkreli controversy last year I'm not so sure. But Shkreli, with his (often funny) dickhead antics, certainly would be a convenient whipping boy -- if anyone, like Congress or special interests -- needed a whipping boy to distract the public from what's actually ailing American health care.

For some perspective, drugs are only 1/10 of American health care costs.

  Prescription drugs: 10%
  Dental care: 4%
  Hospital care: 32%
  Physician/clinical services: 20%
  
  Source: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/PieChartSourcesExpenditures2014.pdf

And as far as Shkreli goes, the reality, as far as I've seen so far, is that no one is paying these sky-high prices for Daraprim out of pocket. Check out Turing's 10-K's; they reinvest their profits in R+D. Shkreli himself seems to be legitimately interested in developing new and better treatments for rare diseases. (CMD+F: "PKAN" on this page: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-17/retrophins...)

Serious question. For these super-rare diseases like toxoplasmosis, the current profit model is this. First, charge a high price ($30k-$100k) for a course of treatment. Then, the few people suffering from the rare disease get the drug via insurance. Does anyone have a better way of incentivizing drug companies to create new treatments, or better treatments, for rare diseases?

The evidence is in the hearings, just watch them. The transcript search doesn't work for me (paywalled).

Also see page 4 of this document (which I already linked to):

http://democrats.oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversig...

And in the congressional hearing there was one family facing a $350,000 price tag for their Daraprim cure which insurance refused to cover altogether because of the price hike, and Turing refused to help. The family did eventually get the medicine they needed, but Turing left them out to dry.

I'm fully aware Turing states "nobody falls through the cracks", but it's a blatant and audacious lie and there are dozens of experts testifying as much. You'll also find expert testimony in the linked videos. Many hospitals stock one or two bottles of Daraprim so they can immediately help walk-in patients. So now when somebody can't get Daraprim through insurance the doctors beg nearby hospitals to fedex the pills they have in stock from before the price hike. This supply is quickly running out.

The sales volume of Daraprim dropped by 80% or so as a result of the price increase, and the Turing executives state that thanks to their actions availability of the drug has broadened. A clear contradiction. Less volume means sick folks simple have to go without, which can have very serious health consequences.

Heck, even the Massachusetts General Hospital stated, and I quote!

    This is a critical matter, visible at the highest levels of our
    Infectious Disease Department [...] Daraprim’s new price on their
    inpatient pharmacy budget, which they have determined to be
    prohibitively expensive. Against their clinical convictions
    they are currently switching patients to Bactrim.

Observe that patients who are now forced to use the inferior Bactrim do not deal with Turing at all, which means there is no application for Turing to reject. Translated into Turing's bizarro PR language: "nobody falls through the cracks". In the real world we understand that people not getting the medicine they need is a problem.

Watch the hearing videos (especially the Subcommitte on Aging one). Read the actual filings and other primary sources, not the PR spin.

Again, you make two claims here. 1: co-pays for Daraprim are very high. 2. Turing does not reimburse for those high co-pays.

You're right about number 1.

You cite no evidence for number 2. For its part, Turing says they reimburse for the high co-pays. Why wouldn't they? It would be a PR disaster not to reimburse, so it's manifestly in their interest. And they're making such a fat profit they can afford to reimburse people for high co-pays.

Page 4 of the document you cited is just a list of examples of high co-pays. Yes.

Again, where's the evidence that Turing does NOT reimburse for those co-pays? Do you have an example?

The evidence is right there in the PDF as well as in the C-SPAN videos I linked. I'm not going through 8 hours of video I watched several months ago to find the exact timestamp, but since you claimed you researched all this you must have watched the videos with all the damning testimony they contain already. It's pretty clear at this point you refuse to acknowledge any evidence that makes saint Shkreli look bad so there's no point in going back and forth any further.

From the memo I linked earlier:

> The email stated that the first patient “has a $6000.00 co-pay. She is not a Medicare part D but has a federal funded insurance plan so wouldn’t quali[f]y for co-pay assistance or be covered under whatever Medicare Part D plan you are working on right now with Turing.” The email stated that the second patient “has insurance, however her plan does not cover Daraprim. Attempted to transfer to UCB for free drug program but was advised that because she has insurance, she does not qualify. Free drug program is only for patients with no insurance.”

Basically, Turing says "sorry, you don't qualify". Turing denies people's claims repeatedly, because they just don't give a fuck. Not to mention the obvious problem of patients not being able to afford the co-pay, thereby having to go without the pills. I've clearly demonstrated that there are cases where patients cannot get the medicine they need as a direct consequence of the price hike. But hey, feel free to believe Turing is acting honorably because they want to protect their reputation. Believe whatever you want. I'm done here.

https://i.imgur.com/XBsKiFx.png

I don't have a horse in the race. I just think you're not reading these documents carefully or considering the evidence carefully.

For example, that case you cite above, the $6k copay. OK. Read the memo closely. A Walgreens exec is emailing a Turing exec citing a patient's problem with Turing's bureaucracy.

How was the problem resolved? Did Turing pay? You say that CLEARLY Turing didn't end up paying in this particular case, because you hate Turing, but the document doesn't say. And you have no idea. Neither do I, but I'm not pretending.

Generally: Turing says, for goodwill, they give away 60% of the drug for a dollar.

Do you know of even one case where someone - verifiably - fell through the cracks and Turing refused to EVER pay?

Are you opposed to the idea of pharmaceutical companies selling orphan drugs at high prices ($100k, $300k, or more)? Or are you only opposed to Turing's purchase of Daraprim and raising the price? Would you still oppose them if, in 10 years, it turned out Turing's profits had, e.g., produced a PKAN drug? Do you know a better way than high drug prices to incentivize the creation of drugs for serious rare diseases?

So who's the real crook?

Is it the sleazebag who legally takes advantage of the terrible system that we refer to as the US health insurance system?

Or is it the 435 representatives and 100 senators who are in the pockets of the insurance companies and pharma companies that perpetuate our current system?

At a moral level, yes the guy is as bad as they come (and those youtube videos of him are just plain weird). But I'd argue he's not the cause of our problems, he's a product of the system that we've cornered ourselves into.

He's a real crook in a system that's awful. It's not either-or in my book.

So I agree he's not the root cause. He just pushes the existing framework to its "logical" conclusion. But only if "Logical" means being as ruthlessly exploitative as possible. Even the other sleazebag drug CEOs don't go this far, so Shkreli is uniquely contemptible.

But yes, ideally anger should be directed to the pharma industry and health insurance as a whole, not to Shkreli the individual.

> He's a real crook in a system that's awful. It's not either-or in my book.

The "either-or" is figuring out which one to go after and where to change things. If you only go after the Shkrelis, it's all for show and probably is a waste of tax payer money as he'll get off the hook for not legally doing anything wrong. People need to wake up and go after the real problem and replace the healthcare system and corrupt officials that perpetuate it.

Why do you only have to go after one side? Both sides (the corruptor and the corrupted) can and should be held accountable. Holding Shkreli accountable is more than just a token gesture, and no charges would've been brought against him if no laws were broken.

I fail to see what laws he's broken. If you're going to allow a "free market" healthcare industry, this is the result. Being a dick isn't a crime. Neither is being a price gouger.

> "I fail to see what laws he's broken."

Take a look then...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-charges-again...

> Take a look then...

> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-charges-again....

Did you actually read that article?

It has nothing to do with price gouging prescription drugs. That's for an unrelated securities fraud charge for juggling hedge fund money. I'm not saying he's not at fault in that situation (honestly not sure) but it's unrelated.

If you want something closer to daraprim:

http://www.legalreader.com/distribution-network-for-daraprim...

That's definitely closer but he hasn't been charged with anything on it. The only charges are for (unrelated) securities fraud.

Exactly. This guy is such a smug bastard that he makes the perfect lightning rod for the whole country to direct their rage at, deflecting it away from the actual system that allows this to happen.

While I detest what he did, it's no different than what any other free-market minded individual would do. Our healthcare system is a profit motivated, not patient motivated. He put profits over people, just like every other big phamrma company. He also was a publicity seeking douchebag, so the media had a field day with him.

In terms of fairness, it's only unfair if we hold some people in the industry to moral standards we don't apply to others. Our choices to maintain fairness are either to hold all economic actors accountable for their actions, or to hold none of the economic actors accountable for their actions. You seem to favour the latter, I favour the former, neither of us is wrong in terms of fairness.

> "AFAIK the drug was free for everyone without insurance"

That was an adjustment made after the initial outrage over the price hikes.

Also, worth considering the "50% price cut" made for hospitals was after raising the original price by 5000%:

http://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=11105404

Lastly, raising the costs for insurance companies raises insurance premiums for customers, if you think they'd let these price rises eat into their own profits I'd suggest that was a little misguided.

How many people are actually using this medication? And after, what, 70 years, no one else is making the drug or had come up with a new treatment?

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/24/...

"Daraprim is used to treat a parasitic infection known as toxoplasmosis, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a leading cause of death attributed to food-borne illnesses. The Toxoplasma parasite can be transmitted through contaminated food, water, and kitchen utensils as well as contact with infected cat feces. While 60 million Americans carry the parasite with no symptoms, it can become deadly for those with weakened immune systems."

""Turing has not got a single clinical trial underway. Shkreli’s not testing new drugs of any kind for toxoplasmosis. He's got nothing registered," Attaran said. "No one needs a new drug for toxoplasmosis anyways. It works so well bloody well.""

It's only 2000 users in the US. Which is why no one bothers to make it, except Turing.

It's easy enough to make, but the FDA changes to older drugs' approval creates perfect conditions for such abuse. Zero other companies have stepped up and got approval yet.

Doesn't it take a while to get to clinical trials?

The volume of patients is irrelevant, the FDA could easily open up the market to competition by bringing in suppliers that were approved by other nations with similar medical standards. They could even compare the statistics regarding complications arising from the drug, it's not exactly like there would be a shortage of applicable data. Why they choose not to do so is beyond me, perhaps other drug companies would fight back against such a move, even if it was only limited to generics.

On a side note, regarding those 2000, there's evidence that toxoplasmosis is under treated in the US, particularly with regards to pregnant women.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2011/10/u-s-not-takin...

Yeah, the cynic in me wonders how much of outrage isn't a media campaign by the insurance companies. As this article points out, the system is broken, yet everyone is pilling on him as if he was the real problem: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/everyone-h...

If I had it, I would use it to entice famous people to have tea with me.

That's basically exactly what happened with Allie Conti in his Vice interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PCb9mnrU1g). Only it was red wine and not tea.

Perhaps this album just wasn't very good, and Wu-Tang (or their managers) realized they could make more money by boosting their fame with this stunt release than they would by actually releasing a crappy album.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was total crap and it was little more than some outtakes and demos.

That actually makes a lot of sense. At most it must be mediocre. If it was amazing they'd definitely want to release it and make money.

If they'd just released the album, I don't think it would be on the front page of HN getting compared to Ai Weiwei, and covered in forbes, the guardian and the atlantic.

Perhaps they value the publicity (and resulting discussion of their work as "serious art") more than the extra money a regular release could have brought.

> Perhaps they value the publicity (and resulting discussion of their work as "serious art") more than the extra money a regular release could have brought.

... which is exactly what the previous posters said: The album isn't good enough to sell great and would likely hurt them in the long run and so a gimmick release will at least have positive publicity and wouldn't ruin the brand. If it was good enough, that publicity would outshine the gimmick release and would also bring in more money short-term.

No, the previous poster said at most the album must be mediocre. It's possible the album is really great, but they place an exceptionally high value on the publicity.

At most it must be? Have you ever heard the story of the fox and the grapes?

I just looked at HN right after pulling up Wu-Tang on Spotify. I realize that it doesn't fundamentally add much to note that, it was just a fun coincidence and I thought I'd share.

It is fun to think about the meta-art of manufactured scarcity. It's fun trying to articulate a rigorous reason for the value difference of Wu-Tang making an album that only one person will get to hear versus me (a decidedly untalented non-musician) making one, when they both sound exactly the same to all of us (unless that dick Shkreli is reading).

That said I would trade all the idle but-what-is-value-really-man musing for Shaolin monks or an unscrupulous Fed to exfiltrate and share the album soonish.

Is it really fun? Or is it just a marketing gimmick to get people talking about the artist.

Honestly it doesn't seem like a marketing gimmick to me. They almost certainly could have made more money by actually releasing the album, and they've no real need of increasing their visibility.

Whether or not you agree, it seems pretty clear that they did this because they thought it was a cool and interesting thing to do.

They almost certainly could have made more money by actually releasing the album

The sales of their last album was pretty abysmal all things considered, and the album before that was hardly top seller. Even if this album did 3-4 times the numbers their last album did, they probably wouldn't have gotten close $2million. It basically seems that 'everybody' loves the early Wu-Tang works, but very few people actually still actively followed them and cared about their current work.

Consider this... What if the meta surrounding the art was the true art? That's what the linked article is suggesting can be a valid possibility. If you limit art to something you have to experience with your own senses then you may miss the full picture.

You're doing it, presumably unpaid, on a Saturday night so hopefully you at least find being cynical about it to be mildly fun :)

I'm having fun doing it, but also I'm dog sitting for my parents out in the boonies.

I upvoted this, :)

But I didn't spend much time on the article.

Is it not both?

People are infinitely fascinated by scarcity.

It's not as simple as that otherwise they'd just record their own CD, write their own game etc. This is more like hoarding; either related to grief (can't let go of a loved one but can keep hold of random shit) or just good old consumerist "you'll be a great person if you buy this". It's pathetic but hey, we're in a late capitalist, consumer driven society where owning a small piece of plastic is more important than saving tens or hundreds of lives.

Reminds me of the short story by SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2834

A lot of the commercial value of art comes from the social signalling that says "I can afford to own this unique and holy relic of personal productivity."

It's the individualised capitalist equivalent of medieval churches competing with each other to buy fragments of the true cross - or some lesser holy knuckle bone, if they weren't in that league.

The Wu Tang Clan album probably exists as a master tape/file somewhere, and possibly also as session backup files, unless they deliberately destroyed everything.

Nice box though.

I had the pleasure of spending a week at MassMoCA a few years ago, it's a unique institution and is a treat to visit.

The OA has a partial quote from Ellsworth Kelly taken from the New York Times obituary [1]. Below is the full quote, which I found useful.

>> “I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living,” he said. “This is an illusion, of course. What I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” <<

[Perhaps the GI Bill at the end of the second world war provides us with an idea of what could happen if we had a basic income.]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/arts/ellsworth-kelly-artis...

Which apparently has nothing to do with Xiaolin Wu's algorithm.

The site is down.

If you had no ego, you would just say Mandelbrot set. If Mandelbrot had no ego, he would have just called it "calculate z_{n+1} = z_n²+1 for each point repeatedly; color it black if it converges...".

Ponder this. Without ego, there is no judgement. And no judgement of those who judge. The cycle breaks.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11558310 and marked it off-topic.

The instructions are more useful. If you don't already know how to calculate the Mandelbrot set, "Draw a Mandelbrot set!" is meaningless to you and presumes knowledge you don't have. It also doesn't specify how to color it; maybe you end up coloring it black if it diverges instead!

Addendum: The artist in the article specified the algorithm (“Within a circle draw 10,000 straight black lines and 10,000 black not straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed.”) and not the result ("Somehow, incredibly... an infinite field of stars emerges"). So I described another algorithm that produces an incredible, unexpected result- one that we use silicon to calculate rather than people.

Further addendum: the Chaos Game is an interesting way to approximate a fractal that you can implement with pencil, paper, ruler, and lots of time on your hands:

1. Draw three points. Best results if they're roughly the vertices of an equilateral triangle.

2. Pick a point at random inside the notional triangle and mark it

3. Pick one of the vertices at random and mark the midpoint between your chosen point and that vertex

4. That midpoint is your new chosen point. Return to 3, rinse and repeat.

I don't think this is about ego -- this is just about naming for convenience. We say "Mandelbrot Set" rather than "calculate (...) converges" because the former has four syllables and the latter has thirty-two.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what you're getting at w/r/t/ judgement and cycles.

Mandelbrot didn't name the set. It was named after him by the mathematicians who first studied it seriously.

> Then, in one of 2015’s greatest moments of schadenfreude, especially for those who care about the widespread availability of quality healthcare and hip hop, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI for fraud. Alas, the FBI left Once Upon a Time in Shaolin in Shkreli’s New York apartment.

So why doesn't the FBI take the bloody thing, and auction it? They sold DPR's Bitcoin, no?

> So why doesn't the FBI take the bloody thing, and auction it?

Shkreli hasn't been found guilty of anything yet (and he put up his $45 million E-Trade account to secure his bond).

Why would the FBI confiscate and sell his property? Just because he was arrested doesn't mean he's guilty, and even if he his that doesn't give the FBI the right to confiscate his property.

Well, they sold DPR's Bitcoin before he was convicted. Cops do that. It's partly how they fund themselves.

I was responding to the precious "maybe we'll never know" aspect of the article. I'm not saying that civil forfeiture is legitimate. Far from it. But it's pretty common.

Edit: Also, the article basically suggests burglary as an option. So ...

To which DPR agreed.

Really? That I did not know. Why? Plea deal?

There were two sets of Bitcoins. The bitcoins found on the SR1 server, which the Ulbricht defense team decided to not claim any interest in (which in retrospect seems like a serious legal blunder per the other comment), and the bitcoins found on Ulbricht's laptop in SF and his backup devices etc. The SR1 server bitcoins could be sold off without any trouble, but Ulbricht's bitcoins were in legal jeopardy as they might have been the proceeds of drug trafficking and not legitimate Bitcoin trading activities. As it happens, Ulbricht's bitcoins also got sold off as part of a mutual agreement between Ulbricht and the government to insulate them against the possibility of Bitcoin going to zero during the lengthy legal proceedings. (Neither party would be happy if terrible things happened to Bitcoin and it slowly went to zero, but they couldn't sell or do anything about it because the bitcoins were frozen.)

In his pre-trial, Ross denied ownership[1] of the server that the coins were found on (for obvious reasons - the server also ran the Silk Road). Since no one claimed ownership, the FBI was free to auction them.

[1] This actually turned out to be a major blunder on the part of the defense. See http://www.wired.com/2014/10/silk-road-judge-technicality/

Eh, do we all really believe the judge on that one? Sure, if he had claimed ownership, then the unreasonable search objection wouldn't have fallen on that point. Except, she eventually would have found some other reason why all FBI activities constituted "reasonable" search. Conviction rate in federal court is over 90%, and for many of those cases only the prosecutor assigned even gives a shit. Everybody in the federal system, FBI, prosecutors, judges, etc. wanted this guy's head on their wall, so no legal argument was going to keep him out of FPMITAP. Ross was fucked from the moment the beast knew his name.

For future projects like Silk Road, a basic part of the security plan will be to set up Ross look-alikes to take the fall, because USA-Justice is not something you can just design around. Once the beast has a scent, it will be fed, by someone.

The nice thing about cash is they can claim it was obtained illegally and it's often very hard to prove it wasn't. There's no reason to believe this album was obtained illegally (and in fact, abundant evidence that it wasn't.)

Yes, but he did buy it.

A time-honored method for legally obtaining things...

If you buy something stolen you don't own it; you've just broken the law and wasted your money. If it can't be proved you knew it was stolen then you've just wasted your money. This is how it is in the UK at least.

But nobody claims the album was stolen, why are you bringing it up?

OK, in https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes/the-first-rule-of-pric... I see this:

> He bought the only copy of Wu Tang Clan’s album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” for $2m, then said “I’ll probably never even hear it. I just thought it would be funny to keep it from people.”

That's why!

Edit: He probably also considered it funny (or at least, ironic) that people died because they couldn't afford Daraprim.

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