Silk Road is gone, but it was replaced by other similar websites rather quickly. What is the point in spending time and money on futile efforts that don't even accomplish what they were intended for?
I get your reasoning but you could equally say the same about child porn and murder. Maybe these sorts of darknet markets may make authorities rethink their drug polices though so maybe something good will come out of it. Most intelligent people know that the war on drugs is a complete failure and an unwinable war. It's also going to be interesting to see how the police deal with decentralized markets where there's no centralized pint of attack/failure.
What concerns me the most in this story was how the feds managed to bust into a highly anonymized encrypted network
just google + bitcointalk
Exactly. They didn't. Ross was silly enough to use his own name when setting it up along with leaving many other clues. Same with the Silk Road 2.0 and Blake Benthall. If they hadn't of made these silly mistakes they might still be free and the sites they set up still up and running. The feds did claim that the captcha silk road used was leaking the forums true server IP but this has been disputed.