Remember that $70k Tesla car which was bought for Bitcoin last December and which the Bitcoin PR-lobby spun with grand fanfare into an excellent example of "user adoption"? Well, turns out, it was bought by one Blake Benthall, a former SpaceX software engineer turned custodian and alleged operator of the illicit goods cyber trafficking site Silk Road 2, which sprung up in the wake of the Feds" take down of the original site and following the arrest of its founder and operator Ross Ulbricht a.k.a the original Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR). Here's the relevant passage from the official criminal complaint: What the documents also show is that the Feds had an undercover agent embedded as an online confidante/moderator of Benthall's organisation and were pretty much onto him from the very beginning: As for why someone with such a promising career in the real world might want to risk it all by jumping into the business of criminal-empire building? Well, the documents put a nice dollar number on the scale of turnover on the world's most popular online illicit drugs site: Apparently, Benthall a.k.a "Defcon" got caught out by a similar error that Ross Ulbricht made, namely linking his official online identity to some of the illegal site's logs. There was also the fact that Benthall didn't bow out and pass on the baton to the next DPR as quickly as he should have, largely because he suffered a major Bitcoin theft in September forcing him to extend his operations until he could recoup some of the losses incurred: We can see why the Feds moved now rather than later: Seems we now know why Bitcoin enthusiasts are so obsessed with going to the moon. Some of them actually work with space rockets.