He broke the law, that's a fact, but I can't imagine someone getting a life sentence in any European country for creating a website. It's restricted only to most dangerous, hardened criminals. Even murderers get between 15 and 25 years in prison.
It was more, far more, than just a website.
And the chances are that if he'd been another nationality he would've wound up being extradited to the US anyway.
He could have fought extradition. If I was going to run something like a darknet site I'd do it from a country that doesn't have an extradition process with the States at least.
Dark web markets are one of the biggest reasons why Bitcoin came on the black list of many. Some people still think if Bitcoin is used for illegal goods and services it's illegal itself.
Also some think in a wrong way that tsking down illegal dark web narkets and putting their creators and runners into jail it's an action against Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But that isn't so and to my opinion someone who runs places where you can buy drugs, weapons, child pornography and similar deserves to be punished and that will not harm Bitcoin, just the opposite.
Silk Road and darknet markets also had a huge part to play in the growth and usage of bitcoin. In fact, I first heard about Bitcoin due to the media coverage of Silk Road.
BTW, has anyone read Curtis Green's book about this?
No, but I'd like to. I'm not sure if it's available online yet. The website he gave on a podcast he was on recently isn't online yet and the ebook link on Amazon is dead:
https://www.amazon.com/Silk-Road-Takedown-Curtis-Green-ebook/dp/B07GFJ23RNAnd the physical copy is sold out or not available:
https://www.amazon.com/Silk-Road-Takedown-Curtis-Green/dp/1726077470/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538736407&sr=8-1&keywords=Silk+Road+TakedownHe did mention he's recording the audiobook version so I'll probably just grab that from Audible when it becomes available:
https://twitter.com/ilovepoker/status/1043364624039440391