I find it hilarious that they take this guy down and nobody from HSBC does a perp walk. I guess it's who you know and how much you can pay off, ya? This has everything to do with the threat Bitcoin represents. HSBC literally paid a 2 Billion dollar fine against specifically money laundering on behalf of organized drug cartels. The investigation took years and not a single HSBC employee has done a perp walk.

Oh, and since when does selling BTC anywhere, including Silk Road, constitute a crime? It's what you buy with BTC, or any other currency, that is the crime.

Adam Gopnik's piece on The Caging of America does a good job explaining what's going on and summing up my feelings on the topic:

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...