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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

The Wayback Machine has an archived copy of silkroadmarket.org from 2011.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110304201806/http://silkroadmar...

It's signed by "-Silk Road staff" at the bottom. If this site was really owned by Karpeles, then he definitely had something to do with Silk Road, whether or not he was DPR.

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Browsing through other dates it was cached reveals that it was regularly updated with details about the SR registration being closed and server outages.

As far as I can tell, the downtime message [1] originated on silkroadmarket.org [2-6]. It doesn't look like Karpeles could have reposted it from somewhere else--he has to have been involved in the Silk Road's operations if he was behind the site.

It's also worth noting that DPR linked to silkroadmarket.org in his signature as the official way to get to site [7].

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120128114453/http://silkroadmar...

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26644.5;wap2

[3] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=17556.10;wap2

[4] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26644.0

[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/i2mq7/the_silk_road_...

[6] http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/06/21/how-and-why-to-get-to-s...

[7] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3984.msg57080#msg570...

Karpeles ran one of the first bitcoin VPS services which is what Ulbricht used to shill the .onion site and uptime status in the beginning.

It's possible that Karpeles knew that a mainstream dark market that used bitcoin would increase the adoption of bitcoin. He may have tried to make that happen by registering the domain and promoting it.

true. this is like indicting twitter because someone posted criminal sites downtime notes.

remember that SR was probably 90% of the transactions, so they had lots of interest in "working" with it. maybe a more apt analogy would be PayPal posting notices about ebay having troubles (before one acquired the other) since it was the source of all transactions

> true. this is like indicting twitter because someone posted criminal sites downtime notes.

Defense attorneys specialize in shedding just enough doubt over the defendant's involvement that the jury won't reach a conviction. It doesn't always work (hence why trials sometimes seem so unpredictable to those of us watching from the outside), but when the burden of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt," any substantial doubt may be enough to convince the jury to acquit.

This trial could go either way. So it's fascinating to watch.

Kalyhost was one of the first (the first?) VPS provider to accept Bitcoins. If Ulbricht didn't want to pay for his server with a credit card, he probably would have ended up being a customer of Kalyhost and MtGox together.

Isn't Kalyhost Mark Karpeles' company?

It looks like sites hosted there used xta.net nameservers, which were used by tibanne.com back in 2009:

http://who.is/nameserver/ns3.xta.net

And his reply on Twitter is that he knows nothing about it, but did admit that one of his companies registered the domain. Classic Karpeles move.

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