Having trouble using curl in php? Because a environment variable wasn't defined? And then ran to SO before trying to print the variable values?..
/facepalm
Edit: Everyday it's the same old shit. One post goes up in votes, another goes down. Why? Who the hell knows. Must've pissed someone off that doesn't know curl.. I swear I have to walk on egg shells in this place. Either way I'm really starting to get tired of this shit. Pull those marshmallow pants up.
I'm not sure about the downvotes either, maybe HN dislikes things like "/facepalm" (I don't care, btw). However I share your disbelief. The guy was running a fairly advanced, high profile, illegal market online and a key piece of evidence linking him to this crime was down him messing up something really pretty simple in a PHP script and asking on a programming Q&A site - that's pretty astonishing.
It's newbie shit and he got in over his head. What other mistakes did this fool commit?
Think about it. You're setting up a marketplace for dangerous people. People that will kill you if anything goes awry. On the other side are people that want to send you to prison. It behooves you to know WTF you are doing.
I'm not sure what anybody is supposed to get out of your post other than that you claim to know PHP and cURL better than an interesting person did 2 years ago. Why would anyone care?
If you can't work curl you are not the guy to be running an illegal website trying to hide from professionals that most certainly do know how to use curl and every other tool properly. If you can't figure out an environment variable, should you really be building something to handle BTC transactions? No you should not. But he learned that the hard way.
/facepalm
Edit: Everyday it's the same old shit. One post goes up in votes, another goes down. Why? Who the hell knows. Must've pissed someone off that doesn't know curl.. I swear I have to walk on egg shells in this place. Either way I'm really starting to get tired of this shit. Pull those marshmallow pants up.