How To Use Bitcoin On Silk Road

This article originally appeared in
Bitcoin Mag‘southward 10th anniversary impress edition
.

Silk Road, the online market named for the historic network of trade routes established during the Han Dynasty, went live in February 2011. Its domain was accessible but on the so-called “nighttime web” via the encrypted and anonymous network software Tor. This eBay for the net’s underworld was the first of its kind: a clandestine marketplace for the buying and selling of (mostly) illicit substances with bitcoin.

It put bitcoin in the easily of endless new users, demonstrated firsthand what could really be possible with decentralized currency and served as Bitcoin’s first pregnant employ example.

For many in the Bitcoin infinite, Silk Road has become a touchstone for Bitcoin’southward utility and its role equally a foil to the mainstream economic system. And, adding to this symbolism, its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested and the site was shut down by federal regime less than iii years after it launched. In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to double life in prison plus forty years without the possibility of parole for money laundering, calculator hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents and conspiracy to traffic narcotics by ways of the internet.

Four years later on, the facts around Ulbricht’s abort and conviction are still fuzzy. While the case may be closed, the truthful identity of Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) — the handle for Silk Route’s infamous operator and the root of many accusations against Ulbricht during his trial — is anything but resolved. Ulbricht has said that he sold the site earlier DPR took the helm, and his legal defense and one former Silk Road employee accept said that multiple people had access to the account. Only the prosecution hoisted the legal blame for all of DPR’s online activities on Ulbricht.

This intractability of online identities has been a major source of contention in the saga of Silk Road. And the unresolved tension is a major reason why, despite its short-lived history and the penalisation of its founder, the legacy of Silk Road is every bit central to the story of Bitcoin as ever.

The Showtime

Ulbricht has claimed that when he started working on Silk Road in 2010, it was never his intention to enable the cosmos of the blackness market it would become. The recent Penn State University graduate had just earned his master’south in science and was struggling to make an touch on with his entrepreneurial efforts. The used-book startup he joined with his friend Donny Palmertree, Proficient Wagon Books, was going belly-up when he left it to work on Silk Road full-fourth dimension.

In a court letter of the alphabet during his sentencing, Ulbricht wrote that he built the marketplace because “people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t pain anyone else.” That the website became a hub for drug trafficking was an unintended (and regretful) effect, he insisted.

“Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to brand their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit. What it turned into was, in part, a convenient way for people to satisfy their drug addictions. I exercise not and never have advocated the abuse of drugs.”

If he had been more “mature,” the court letter goes on, he would have “done things differently.” In a twisted sort of way, Ulbricht’due south ostensible regret and his eventual arrest tin can be seen as a measure of the site’s success.

For an anarchic market, Silk Road was fastidiously curated. Ulbricht created escrow accounts for transactions, drugs had product descriptions and pictures similar you’d find on other online marketplaces, and sellers and their wares even had review sections. It also had a strict ready of rules regulating what could and couldn’t be sold; child porn, weapons and annihilation that could be used to inflict harm on others were strictly prohibited.

What started as Ulbricht selling his own homegrown psychedelic mushrooms to kickstart the marketplace swelled to 10,000 accounts in 2012 and, eventually, ane 1000000 at its peak. Before its closure, analysts estimated that it attracted anywhere from $xv million to $45 meg annually in black-market business. Every bit the site swelled in popularity, Ulbricht kept a full-time staff and paid $fifty,000 a month for security.

Silk Road Rising

Silk Road’s fame had escaped the confines of its clandestine coterie and was creeping into the lens of pop culture’s scandalous gaze when a June 2011 contour of the marketplace by Gawker brought information technology into the limelight. This was good for business, as account registration surged. Simply information technology also meant Silk Route was increasingly on the government’s radar, with Washington, D.C., mainstays like New York Senator Charles Schumer calling for its demise.

A young Ulbricht, showered with success but under mounting stress, was in the hot seat.

“I was mentally taxed and now I felt extremely vulnerable and scared,” he wrote in a 2011 periodical entry.

Ulbricht needed aid and then more than ever. He employed more than staff and started taking cues from a mentor and confidant named Variety Jones (aka “Cimon,” post-obit a pseudonym change). For instance, Jones identified a security vulnerability in the site’due south bitcoin wallet.

In late 2011, Ulbricht allegedly told a programming friend that he was the human behind Silk Route. Around the same time, he may accept also revealed his interest to a romantic interest.

When Jones institute out that these two people might know Ulbricht’southward connection to the site, he encouraged Ulbricht to alter Silk Road’s administrator business relationship handle to Dread Pirate Roberts — a pseudonym that would get significant during Ulbricht’s trial.

“You need to change your proper name from Admin to Dread Pirate Roberts,” Jones told Ulbricht in a January 2012 chat. “Clear your old trail — to be honest, as tight as you play things, you are the weak link from those two prev[ious] contacts.”

The moniker Dread Pirate Roberts comes from a fictional graphic symbol in “The Princess Helpmate” whose generation-transcending persona is adopted fourth dimension and fourth dimension over again by always-new personalities. The symbolism and part, Jones unsaid, would be perfect for Ulbricht’due south role equally Silk Route’s figurehead: It would obscure ownership nether the guise of multiple operators.

“And over the years, a new one would take the name, and the old one would retire … starting time the fable now,” Jones coaxed in a chat. “DPR by its very nature indicates a rotating control. We’ll play that.”

Ulbricht inverse his admin contour some weeks later the Jan 2012 conversation.

The notion that DPR was multiple people became a pillar of Ulbricht’south defense during his trial, since the chain of events that followed could never be definitively tied solely to him.

Cocaine, Undercover Cops and Bounties

By 2013, the site’s success was reaching critical mass and the person acting as DPR was faced with critical ultimatums.

When a Silk Route administrator, Curtis Clark Greenish, was arrested for cocaine possession, underground agents got their hands on the first man link to the site. The head of the task force that arrested Dark-green, Carl Forcefulness, took over Green’south business relationship, used the pseudonym “Nob” to speak with DPR via Silk Road’s private chat and used Green equally an informant.

Masquerading as a member of a drug dare, Nob told DPR that he had mucked up a cocaine sale past accidentally sending it to Dark-green. Nob asked Dread Pirate Roberts if he needed assistance rectifying the situation with Green. Though DPR was hesitant at kickoff, he eventually took Nob up on the offer, starting time by asking him to rough Green up and so he’d coughing up the funds he stole, then by ordering his assassination. Agent Force, even so posing as Nob, faked a torture scene in a Common salt Lake Marriott to forge Green’due south death. The price tag for the job was $lxxx,000 in bitcoin.

Business at Silk Route cracked on every bit usual, but Dread Pirate Roberts would allegedly resort to assassination bounties 5 more times during Silk Road’s dwindling lifetime, all of which turned out to be faked. None of the targets were ever assassinated, and information technology is at present believed that Dread Pirate Roberts was ready upwardly.

Ulbricht himself was never charged for the second set up of ordered assassinations, and his indictment for ordering Green’s bump-off, which was filed in Maryland, was dismissed in July 2018 for prejudice. Despite lingering questions about who was using the DPR handle and when, the prosecution was permitted to use prove of Green’due south staged assassination in Ulbricht’s trial for operating Silk Route, though the courtroom never charged him for it.

On October 2, 2013, FBI agents arrested Ulbricht in the scientific discipline-fiction section of a San Francisco library. Distracted by two agents who faked a lovers’ quarrel, Ulbricht took his optics off his work long enough for another agent to take hold of his laptop. With sleight of mitt and the insertion of a USB drive, police enforcement officials now had access to Silk Route’s treasure trove of secrets.

The jig was upwards. Ulbricht was whisked abroad to New York for a nearly year-long trial, which ended in the double life judgement plus 40 years that he is currently serving.

Silk Route’s Legacy And The Gratis Ross Campaign

“The government did not produce a single witness to evidence immediate that Ulbricht authored any of the communications attributed to DPR. Information technology was all digital, created and transmitted on an anonymous, untraceable internet network.” — Joshua Dratel, criminal defense attorney

Ulbricht’s legal defense force appealed his case in 2016 on the grounds that prosecutors withheld evidence of malfeasance on behalf of agents involved in the case and that Ulbricht received an unreasonably harsh sentence (one more than heavy-handed than what El Chapo received, for instance). A gauge denied this appeal in 2017, and a writ of certiorari petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court was shot down in 2018 also.

Since her son’south arrest, Lyn Ulbricht has actively crusaded to ease his judgement. The Gratis Ross campaign she started online has received over 170,000 signatures in favor of his release or a reduced sentence. Lyn Ulbricht and her son’due south defenders believe that, more than than his receiving a draconian punishment, Ulbricht was a scapegoat, sacrificed on the altar of the U.Due south. justice system to prove a point.

Ulbricht was framed, they say, by others who had taken on the Dread Pirate Roberts proper noun and were operating the DPR account.

“Our position, every bit information technology has always been, is that Ross is not DPR who is participating in those chats,” Ulbricht’s legal representation told “Wired” in April 2015.

Even with some proof pointing toward Ulbricht operating the Dread Pirate Roberts handle at some point in time, disputes still loom as to whether or not he was the only person backside the business relationship. Light-green, for example, in one case said on a podcast that at that place “absolutely” were multiple individuals who had admission to the username.

“I was DPR once,” he said. “So if I was, who else was?”

In addition, his defenders also debate that the weather for Ulbricht’south arrest violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, that agents tampered with or mishandled bear witness on Ulbricht’southward laptop following his arrest and that the jury was never given all of the information information technology needed in order to reach a fair verdict. For instance, the defence force attempted to call Bitcoin adept Andreas Antonopoulos and computer networking and internet security good Steven Bellovin as expert witnesses, but they were prevented from testifying.

We’ll likely never know when Ulbricht was and was non at the captain of the Dread Pirate Roberts account. But at the very to the lowest degree, the Dread Pirate Roberts pseudonym functioned exactly as Variety Jones envisioned: After Silk Road went down, plenty of successors rose from its ashes, and its legacy has remained firmly entrenched.

And Ulbricht’s arrest has proven to be a rallying cry. Presently afterward, another Dread Pirate Roberts launched Silk Road ii.0 with the assist of two original Silk Road admins, Inigo and Libertas. That site cruel prey to law enforcement in 2014, and Silk Road 3.0 stepped into its place until that, too, went offline in 2017. Other similar sites, such as Wall Street Marketplace, AlphaBay, Dream Market and Hansa, would either succumb to law enforcement or shut down operations to avert the same fate as their predecessors.

Fifty-fifty with its progenitor in jail, the online underground market model that Ulbricht initiated persists. When one goes down, another (and another and some other) takes its place, as one would expect in a free market. Lyn Ulbricht told “Bitcoin Magazine”that this free marketplace is precisely what her son envisioned, emboldened by the libertarian philosophy that willed it into existence, and has always been central to the cryptocurrency information technology leveraged.

“I recollect Ross’south motivation in creating Silk Route was to provide a truly gratis market place that was private and used bitcoin, as he saw the potential for monetary liberty that bitcoin provided,” she said. “Fifty-fifty the sentencing gauge said she knew he created the site for philosophical reasons. She just wasn’t convinced he had given up that philosophy and felt justified in condemning him to die in prison for it.”