This is fantastic news. I was expecting it for a long time, actually at the Amsterdam conference last week I was talking to a member of the Dutch police who had taken part in a panel, and mentioned I was waiting for DPR to show up in a US court at some point. I didn't think it'd happen a week later, but this outcome was eventually inevitable.

The point I made to Niels (the police guy) was that DPR had way too much confidence in the technologies he was using to keep him safe. I said I understood Tor and Bitcoin very well and there's no way I'd treat either of them as a silver bullet. And that's assuming NO mistakes. I didn't even know how I'd cash out. The best some people listening in could offer was "find someone who would help you cash out that's not an exchange". But where would you find someone capable of sinking non-trivial amounts of Bitcoins for dollars, outside of an exchange?

It's hard to tell from the documents to what extent he cashed out. Perhaps those details will come at trial. But given he was living with flat mates I guess his lifestyle was cheap and he probably didn't ever cash out into dollars in a big way - obviously lacking any fake IDs he didn't have any way to use the exchanges. This is also very good news. It is a strong argument that Bitcoin is not some super trivial way for criminals to make wild profits - despite the huge sums being quoted by the FBI agent, those are theoretical amounts of dollars he could have obtained if he'd had some way to do so, not amounts he actually made (given the tiny size of the Bitcoin economy).

By the way - I'm amazed at how many people are surprised that a drug dealer with extreme anarcho-capitalist tendencies turned out to be not a swell guy! Imagine that!