Considering what the account was up to I sincerely doubt it was being used without Tor or a VPN.

This article asserts some opsec failures - time zones switching when they shouldn’t etc.

It’s quite plausible that they didn’t manage perfect vpn usage every single time.

Expert level opsec - very rarely make deliberate "mistakes" by having an inconsistent timezone, or tunneling through someone's compromised home device instead of a VPN, to throw adversaries on wild goose chases.

They also committed with a different email address and a different name once or twice. This may have been intentional, though, to misdirect.

I'm surprised they didn't set up guards to prevent mistakes like commits with the "wrong" timezones...

Probably; but ask Ross Ulbricht how easy it is to screw that up.

The thing is you only need to make a mistake once.

Despite the British English elsewhere, "could care less" is a particularly American error. I think that's noteworthy.

He's also fairly inconsistent. He occasionally uses -ize endings, e.g. "realize". He also uses some language that is more prevalent in North American English, e.g. "sucks", "gotten", "chump change" and others.

Someone attempting to use British English to obscure their identity would know to use words like "maths" and "flat", as he did; not as many people however are aware that British English doesn't (typically) feature the word "gotten", which he used on multiple occasions. To me, this lends to the theory the BrE was a misdirection.

(As an aside, he's inconsistent in some other things, like "e-mail" versus "email", "TOR" versus "Tor", and "double click" versus "doubleclick".)