Ross was never tried for this and it was almost certainly a baseless acusation to destroy his reputation. Obviously these acusations still follow him today. This is how these people opperate. Potentially these acusations had some affect on Ross receiving his insanely long sentance for running a website.
Here is an article discussing this in further detail after the charges were dropped:
dropped:
https://reason.com/2018/07/25/ross-ulbrichts-murder-for-hire-charges-d/
So they're claiming that the logs lifted from Ross' computer were fabricated by the federal agents?
I can only say that the investigation was not on the up and up. This was the guy that received the payment from who ever operated the Dread Pirate Roberts account (possibly even himself):
Just watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-odGW6UyEw
There's screen shots of him confirming he sent the money to someone with the intention of having someone killed. Now it seems like he got scammed out of 1600 BTC and nobody was actually killed. And as you said, there was never actually a trial or any conclusions made on these claims. But to me, there's certainly some evidence suggesting he did hire someone for murder and idk if I agree Ross did nothing wrong.
There are logs showing that the Dread Pirate Roberts account tried to hire a hitman. There were known to be multiple people who had access to the account including possibly the corrupt DEA agent who was put in prision for embezzling Bitcoin related to this investigation. There was a login to the account after Ross was in custody.
It would have been impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ross was the one who ordered the hit however the judge did reference the ordered hit during the sentencing. His sentence seemed intentionally punitive in an attempt to scare people away from Bitcoin.
A more complete summary of events:
Thanks for the additional context! Did not know those things.
