There’s a saying: never steal, the government hates competition.
Ross Ulbricht if you read his story was an extremely intelligent person who received a full academic scholarship and majored in Physics and received a masters degree in material science.....
His manifesto indicated he wanted to create a marketplace with complete anonymity free from all government regulation and control where goods and services were paid for in a currency that could not be tracked and was unregulated, bitcoin in this case....
I don’t believe the guy was evil or some criminal mastermind he was a brilliant person who had a crazy dream of utopia.....he deserved punishment but what he was got was intended to send a message to anyone thinking of replacing him...