grabbing brass rings like his
Eagle Scout badge and the
graduate school fellowship.
His failures after leaving
graduate school had led him,
by late 2010, to a crisis of
confidence
in
which
he
turned away from his friends
and broke up with his
girlfriend for a spell.
“I felt ashamed of where
my life was,” he wrote in the
digital diary he kept on his
laptop. “More and more my
emotions and thoughts were
ruling my life and my word
was losing power.”
Silk Road was, in some
sense, a last heave—a Hail
Mary in the parlance of
Ross’s
football-mad
hometown. By the time he
got it open in late January, he
had, by his own accounting,
gone through $20,000 of the
$30,000 he had to his name.
When Silk Road finally
opened up to anyone with a
Tor web browser it was a
simple site, with pictures of
Ross’s mushrooms next to
their price in Bitcoin. At the
top, there was a man in a
turban riding a green camel,
which would come to be the
site’s
trademark
image.
Within days, a few people
signed up, and the first orders
came
in
for
Ross’s
mushrooms. Soon thereafter,
the first vendors joined in,
offering to sell their own
illegal wares. By the end of
February,
twenty-eight
transactions had been made
for products including LSD,
mescaline,
and
ecstasy.
Ross’s growing confidence
was evident from a message
he posted on the Bitcoin
forum from his new screen
name: silkroad.
“The general mood of this
community is that we are up
to something big, something
that can really shake things
up. Bitcoin and Tor are
revolutionary and sites like
Silk Road are just the
beginning,” he wrote on the
forum.
In his own diary, Ross
was more frank: “I am
creating a year of prosperity
and power beyond what I
have
ever
experienced
before.”
CHAPTER 7
March 16, 2011
The response to Silk Road
on the Bitcoin forums was
initially somewhat tepid—
only a few people chimed in.
But it got much more
attention on the most widely
used message board for
hackers—4chan—and
new
Silk Road members were
soon pouring in, along with
orders. By mid-March, the
site had over 150 members.
That was, in fact, more than
Ross was equipped to handle.
He had to return again and
again to the friend who had
been helping him with the
code, to figure out how to
deal with all the traffic. When
the site went down on March
15, he chatted his friend
Richard Bates in a panic.
“i’m so stressed! i gotta
get this site up tonight,” Ross
wrote.
“I’m not sure how this
stuff works,” Richard wrote
back.
“i wish i did,” Ross
responded.
One of the people who
visited the site while it was
temporarily offline was the
host of a popular libertarian
radio
program
in
New
Hampshire, Free Talk Live,
who was broadcasting live at
the time. Ian Freeman and his
cohost had been introduced to
Bitcoin earlier in the year by
Gavin Andresen, a regular
listener who thought the show
could reach an audience that
would be sympathetic to
Bitcoin. At a lunch with
Gavin, the hosts of Free Talk
Live had shown interest, but ultimately
went
away
unconvinced. Who was going
to have an incentive to use
this? they asked. Their views,
though, changed dramatically
less than two months later
when they learned about Silk
Road.
“All of the sudden my
interest has been piqued,”
Freeman said on the air.
Freeman and his cohosts
did their best to explain how
Bitcoin
and
Silk
Road
worked and they debated the
possibility that Silk Road was
a trap set up by the CIA. But
the hosts agreed that Silk
Road was something utterly
new, harnessing Bitcoin to
enable a type of transaction
that was, for all intents and
purposes, not possible before
—an online drug purchase.
What’s more, getting cocaine
or LSD delivered to your
home—or a rented mailbox—
seemed highly preferable to
meeting a sketchy dealer at
some dark rendezvous.
When Freeman tried to
get on Silk Road while he
was on the air, and found it
was down, he wondered if it
had all been a mirage. But
when he had been on the site
shortly before, he had seen
151 registered users and 38
listings.
Someone
had
recently delivered ecstasy
tablets from Europe to the
United States, taped to the
inside of a birthday card.
Here was something that
could take advantage of
Bitcoin’s unique qualities and
help it grow.
“This could be the killer
application
for
Bitcoin,”
Freeman said.
When Ross learned about
the broadcast a day later, he
had gotten Silk Road up
again, and he wrote to his
friend Richard Bates with a
mixture of fear and pride.
“my site had a 40 minute
spot on a national radio
program,” Ross wrote in a
chat session with Richard.
“friggin crazy, you gotta
keep my secret buddy,” Ross
added.
“I haven’t told anyone
and I don’t intend to,”
Richard wrote back.
“i know i can trust you,”
Ross responded.
ONE OF THE many listeners
who heard the conversation
about Silk Road on Free Talk
Live was Roger Ver, an
American entrepreneur living
in Tokyo, just a few miles
from Mark Karpeles.
In comparison with many
Bitcoin aficionados, Roger
had a rather happy upbringing
in the Bay Area, where he
grew up with one sister and
two half brothers. He had
been a natural at the strategy
game Magic: The Gathering
—so good that he traveled on
an amateur circuit to play
competitively. But he was
also on a wrestling team, and
he and his brother both spent
many afternoons fine-tuning
their muscle cars—Roger’s, a
Mercury Capri; his brother’s,
a Mustang.
At the age of twenty,
Roger signed up to run for the
California state assembly as a
libertarian candidate, vowing
never to take a government
salary. In the midst of his
campaign for the assembly,
federal agents arrested Roger
for peddling Pest Control
Report 2000—a mix between