Thoughts vaguely linked to the article.The Economist is one of our natural allies in many senses, to both darknet markets like SR, and to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. They are interested in economic innovations, technology, various security issues, and they are proponents of free markets. Less violence in the world and more wealth for it. Obviously they think the Drug War is a disaster both financially and morally. They fully grasp that the DEA are a tax funded collection of armed thugs ensuring the monopolies of other monopolies like the Cartels. People who deal with numbers and statistics in general tend to see straight through false narratives that sound plausibly correct to even a moderately intelligent 'joe' or 'jane'.I think they would like to run an entire magazine on the Silk Road or Bitcoin purely because they are such novel enterprises. However they have severe restrictions, not just legal, but political too. They have to exist in the physical world. It's one thing for the chicken brains at Gawker to print material on SR, and something else entirely for The Economist to do so because they are taken seriously by every government and corporation in the world. SR and Bitcoin will already have to be approaching household name familiarity before they take the risk of more openly discussing, perhaps even openly supporting us.However they are the most likely institution to come out on our side not least because their authors are all anonymous and they put a high premium on the truth. Long before 4chan, centuries before the Internet in fact, The Economist (think of the era of the pamphleteers, like mini blogs being physically handed around) recognized the utility in using anonymity (or at least psuedoanonymity given that we know their geographical location). Anonymity is sacrosanct for free speech and honest speech where ideas are recognized as being good or bad according to their merits as opposed to the influence of the author, that has been known long before the age of electronic communications.I believe that when cryptocurrencies start to threaten the tax base, then TE will take off the gloves and do battle with the government. I'm not saying that everybody at their institution agrees with us, they would probably prefer a much more regulated market with some mandatory controls e.g. > 18 years of age to enter the market, but once Bitcoin and other future cryptocurrencies have a macroeconomic affect, then the floodgates will open and some countries will adopt positive stances to it and others negative stances. I would guess that the developing countries of India, Brazil and many others will support us. In their mode of thought they are more sympathetic to us for historical, economic and practical reasons to say nothing of morality. There isn't a government in South America that concurs with US drug policy. They deal with its results on a daily basis. In South East Asia, the majority of governments would do a rather dramatic turn about face if they could. Kissing ass is expensive, but they'll keep doing it because not doing it makes life much worse for their peoples indirectly through economic sanctions. The majority of extreme measures against drug consumers and vendors exist purely because the DEA controls much of US policy abroad and has spies everywhere. i.e. their tactic is essentially "be anti-drug or you're not a friend to the West".Of course this is complete bullshit. It is this modern incarnation of the DEA that is the enemy of the West in reality. And by God we will bring them crashing down one way or the other. There is no way out of this for the DEA, they're dinosaurs and I don't mean technologically, I mean their mindset comes straight out of the Middle Ages. The sheer existence of SR is an existential threat to the DEA. They are going to try as hard as they possibly can to equate the Silk Road and any other online drug markets with terrorism, with murder, with pedophilia, anything they possibly can use to smear us so they can get other agencies of the government to do the heavy lifting and extend their domain to the Internet. They are free riders.It must be understand that although many of us are not exactly on board with many US actions over the past decade, the enemy of SR is not the US government. That is an entire network. The real enemy is a node within that network, the DEA. They will try to drag the other nodes in out of a collective sense of self preservation, but so long as we keep to our principals, build and grow our markets without coercion, without violence, then they should fail. The other nodes have more important objectives that simply don't involve fucking around on the Internet to search for drug dealers even if they wanted to.This is why it is important for us to keep the ball in the DEA's court and give no excuse for it to be passed to other agencies, so matter how mad you might be that US prisons and US foreign policy are completely over the top. Non violence is a card to play and it must be played first, no goodwill, no game, just endless arms races until both sides become dead or exhausted of resources. Peace should be thought of as something that requires active maintenance, where violence is what happens what you stop maintaining it and let your emotions run riot.The thing is that cryptocurrencies *are* a potential existential threat to the entire state even if the Silk Road technically isn't by itself. In other words, being associated with Bitcoin could be a poisoned chalice for us. This is a two way street here in our relationship with the cryptocurrency. Some B$ people are against us, which is why we should be wary of them and be politically astute, because I reckon they're going to get much more heat than the darknet drug markets ever will if bitcoin is used to facilitate tax evasion.I am about to make a prediction!The future will be... complicated. ;)I believe that cryptocurrencies will encourage the existence of city states as opposed to federalism. A huge tide is turning here in world history. Confederacies becomes a much more successful form of relationship with truly free currencies. The emergence of Leviathan, the very concept of 'national' and 'nation' strongly depended on control over a central bank, much more so than even we realized. Without central banks, new forms of governance will be required to manage our affairs outside of economy. We do need governance. Social organization needs to exist, there is nobody who is being an anarchist about that. Unless, you know, you don't like belonging to clubs or a family and you hate having friends...! Whether we need governments, at least in their present form, is up on the table as an open question thanks to cryptocurrency. I think we do, but they will be much smaller and paradoxically also more powerful. They will have various 'helper classes' of other organizations which revolve around them like a constellation, but which are not part of a government but an independent grouping. So, confederacies of city states and a lot lot more NGOs, I think that is the solution and we shall all we be wildly richer and better off in comparison to before, possibly with much more minor conflicts, but no large catastrophic state based wars because our self interest shall be too intertwined with the others. I think this is a world where collectivism and individualism are both better off, where their modes of thinking undergo significant evolution and become much more diverse.But I don't think we're going to get to that world without a great deal of tumult, possibly epic amounts of violence. It will be a huge upheaval, even with the best will in the world. Getting past that stage is the kind of worry that keeps me up at night. I can see people who use cryptocurrency getting turned into "Jews" if you take my meaning.tldr; I think in the future we'll be living in a world that is much different to our present one, that you'll have to go back 2 or 3 centuries until capitalism sparked its revolutions to find a comparable change to society.