But for all of the DOJ details that, if accurate, make The Silk Road an indefensible enterprise, I can’t help but conclude, after reading the complaint, that the world is actually going to be a more dangerous place in the absence of the online marketplace. If its facts are correct, the FBI wasn’t wrong to shut down the site, where people were allegedly hired to make hits and break into the computers of innocents**. Good riddance to that. For the vast majority of sellers and purchasers, however, The Silk Road was a marketplace for illegal narcotics, and a strong case can be made that it facilitated a significantly less damaging drug trade than what existed before it. If that's so, the implication isn’t that The Silk Road should be restarted, but that we'd be better off with a sanctioned online narcotics trade.

At its most basic level, The Silk Road served as a middleman that earned a reputation for trust among buyers and sellers. I never accessed the site when it was online. But my conversations with journalists and programmers who explored its listings square with the basic explanation in the FBI's criminal complaint: buyers had to fund their Silk Road accounts with Bitcoins, an anonymous digital currency; upon making a purchase, the necessary funds would be held in escrow by The Silk Road; once the transaction was complete, funds were transferred; and various measures were taken to protect the anonymity of all parties involved. Buyers could also review the products offered by sellers.

It's easy to see why computer-savvy buyers preferred getting their drug of choice on The Silk Road. The purchase could be made without ever identifying oneself to a drug dealer (or undercover cop), going to see him in some potentially dangerous location, or inviting him over. User reviews meant the product was a known quantity. And apparently the drugs were high quality — the FBI said it made numerous purchases on The Silk Road, and that “samples of these purchases have been laboratory tested and have typically shown high purity levels.”

Elsewhere, the FBI states that:

“Silk Road has been used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs...”

“Based on the postal markings on the packages in which the drugs arrived, these purchases appear to have been filled by vendors located in over ten different countries...”

“The narcotics sold on the site tend to be sold in individual-use quantities...”

Think of what that means.

On many thousands of occasions, drug dealers in foreign countries decided that, rather than using armed truck drivers, bribed customs agents, desperate drug mules, thuggish regional distributors, and street level drug dealers who used guns to defend their territory, they’d just mail drugs directly to their far away customers. Of course, folks at the beginning of the supply chain were still often violent drug cartels who one hates to see profit. But from the perspective of the many innocents who suffer from the black market supply chains involved in traditional drug sales, narcotics via mail order would seem to be a vast improvement.