Tag: Silk Road

Everyone reading this has a big regret. It is the same collective one. You know. Not investing in Bitcoin decades ago when it was just starting out. The same thing you said probably a decade ago, and maybe said a couple of years ago. If it keeps going up though….should you invest now? Hard to say.

It’d be easier to guess and get lucky with the next bitcoin, but there are a lot out there, and no one is reaching that same level of price, so its a hard battle.

But what does that have to do with the movie Silk Road? No, not the ancient one. The new one, that was for drugs on the internet with bitcoin! Ah yes, the story is full circle now. Sure, I would love a movie about the start up and take down of one of the most infamous “websites” out there.

Need this film to make at least this much money to break even.

Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) is one of those types. You know. A libertarian. He believes in lots of freedoms and getting away from the federal and local governments as much as possible. And probably, sometimes, he believes in non libertarian ideals as well, but that’s one of the perks of being a libertarian. Being able to claim to be different despite being just like everyone else.

Anyways. He is good at computers, and likes bitcoins and thinks all of this is the future. So he ends up setting up Silk Road. An Amazon for drugs and illegal stuff! Nothing really bad like assassins for hire, but weed, LCD, fun stuff. And thanks to encryption, the dark web, and bitcoin, he can set this whole thing up and even have the drugs mailed through the US postal service right to people’s doorsteps. Ah yes. Freedom.

But the government ain’t going to let this one slide. They will have a crack team (heh) of FBI specialists who know the internet to try and trace him and bring him in. And they will also have Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), a DEA agent close to retirement who also has huge money issues, trying to figure out how to stop it despite being mostly computer illiterate and his much younger boss not caring about what he works on.

Also starring Alexandra Shipp, Jimmi Simpson, Katie Aselton, Lexi Rabe, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Daniel David Stewart, and Paul Walter Hauser. 

“What the fuck is the internet?“

If I had to guess, Silk Road wanted to be the next Social Network with some Catch Me If You Can action. People avoiding arrest and starting tech revolutions. Hip young people out to save the world. Violence and drugs and maybe even a little bit of sex.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end up being as good as either of these films. It is a lot less witty and pretty bare bones on the plot. I liked parts, I hated parts, and I really thought a lot of information was skipped on the true story elements. I don’t even know if that is true. It just feels like a lot of it was skipped around or ignored or just accomplished during montages. And in terms of a police cat and mouse game with Ulbricht, well, it is really just mostly avoidance until a couple things get let up, and that is it.

Fun fact, Robinson and Shipp were previously in the movie Love, Simon, in definitely not a relationship, but they are in one for some time in this movie.

Back to this movie. It is such a good story in real life, but I think the movie tries to remain neutral in all of the story telling, so it can’t really fully give me a really wow granting storyline. All of the acting is just fine. It was good to find out about the DEA agent who decided to be a dickbag about this whole thing a well, but it doesn’t make this version of the story interesting enough to ever warrant a rewatch unfortunately.

The internet can be a dark and scary place. And that is based only on my limited experience as a regular person. But in reality, I have only seen the surface of what the internet really offers. So I can sound cool, I will start using the lingo and refer to regular internet as Surface Web for that reason! I watched Dope, which means I know what I am about to talk about.

But there is a darker side of the internet. A deeper side. A Deep Web, if you will. This part of the internet has “non-indexed content”, or pages that cannot be found through simple searching. In this area, a lot of fun stuff can happen, including: anonymity. That is one of the biggest complaints about our lives. If we want to remain anonymous, we have to basically go off grid to do so. Everything tracks us, our phones, our search history, everything. But the deep web is where people can just do things that they want to do without worry.

Sure, some of those things might be very illegal activities, like hiring hit men or child pornography. But there is also less serious stuff, like simple selling of drugs or other contraband, and just a community of people who can be honest with one another. Deep Web is a documentary that explores just what is the Darknet and talks about Silk Road, a famous website for drugs and more, that went to trial recently. And interestingly enough, it was directed by Alex Winter, aka Bill from Bill and Ted. Admit it, you were wondering what he was doing with his life.

To make things even better, the documentary is narrated by Keanu Reeves himself.

Bill and Ted’s Darknet Journey!

Enough joking, this is SERIOUS BUSINESS. After all drugs are bad right? Well, not if you listen to like, 5 of the documentaries I have reviewed (And meant to review). Silk Road was a place founded to buy and sell goods with anyone around the world, using bitcoin, an untraceable (if you do it right), currency. It was the safest and best way to get drugs and is one of the biggest reasons Bitcoins became so valuable.

It then goes into the sites eventual take down by the FBI, how they did it, and how they captured the supposed creator or owner of the site, Dread Pirate Roberts aka Kirk Ulbricht.

Of course, naturally, it then goes into the trial, the investigation, shady things that happened and very shady things that happened. This trial ended this year, so it is recent. The point it makes is that the trial wasn’t fair, and the government did illegal things and broke a lot of real life privacy laws to do what it did. Is that guy really the Dread Pirate Roberts? Hell if I know. Probably. But doesn’t mean that I would be fine with the government stepping so far outside their laws to catch him.

It is just a snowball effect. If it is fine with one person, it is fine with everyone, and it is more fuel for the NSA to keep their sails on course.

Now, despite all of this, I still think the documentary went way too long on the trial information. Halfway through it, I was finding myself bored and more susceptible to distractions. A lot of pauses started to happen as I cared less and less. I can agree something sucks, and I can say it started out great, but I wanted a bit more information on Deep Web and other things going on there. Over 75% of this is actually just about the Silk Road and the trial, but damn it, the documentary wasn’t called Silk Road.