December 2012
For all the new mainstream interest, the most successful entrepreneur in the Bitcoin world was still Ross Ulbricht, the operator of the world’s largest online drug bazaar. Silk Road had continued adding new members and new products through 2012. Some $1.2 million worth of Bitcoin was changing hands each month, spinning off $92,000 in commissions for Ross. By the end of 2012 there were seventy thousand different topics on Silk Road’s forum, and there were even resident security experts who helped users ensure their anonymity and a resident doctor who answered questions about drugs and their health effects.
Initially, Ross had enjoyed the success by traveling to Southeast Asia and Costa Rica. But as the year went on, the site increasingly required all-consuming work. Ross now had several moderators and administrators on staff who helped him deal with customer support and mediate disputed transactions. He chose members whom he trusted, even when he didn’t know their identity.
In the fall of 2012 Ross had moved in with a childhood friend on a hilly street in one of San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods. He could have afforded his own place, but by now he was trying to leave as few traces as he could for the authorities to pick up on. His work on Silk Road was done at an Internet café around the corner from his friend’s house; at this café he would log in remotely to Silk Road’s servers, making it that much harder for anyone to find him.
Ross was becoming acutely aware of just how difficult it was to remain anonymous even with the best technologies. Over the summer, a Silk Road user had managed to follow a series of transactions and find one of Silk Road’s main Bitcoin wallets, which contained coins worth about $2 million. This didn’t cover any losses, but it was a reminder that while Bitcoin did not require users to provide an identity, accounts were pseudonymous, attached to a particular identity, rather than anonymous. In Australia, police traced transactions to make the first arrests of Silk Road vendors in that country.
None of this, though, dented Ross’s boldness and ambitions for the site—if anything, he grew more committed as time went on. On the forums, under his screen name Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR, he wrote that he would keep this up to his “last breath”:
Once you’ve seen what’s possible, how can you do otherwise? How can you plug yourself into the tax eating, life sucking, violent, sadistic, war mongering, oppressive machine ever again? How can you kneel when you’ve felt the power of your own legs?
As Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross became a kind of folk hero for his members, engaging with them on the Philosophy, Economics, and Law section of the forum and later on DPR’s Book Club, where he advocated for a world in which “the human spirit flourishes, unbridled, wild and free!”
As time went on, though, it was hard to avoid the growing reminders of the dangers of living in an anonymous world with no source of authority. In November 2012 a hacker threatened to release an enormous trove of data about Silk Road users if Ross didn’t pay a ransom. That was soon followed by a denial-of-service attack that eventually forced the site down. The only way Ross was able to get the attack to stop was by paying the attacker $25,000. When the site came back online, Dread Pirate Roberts’s style and approach had shifted, leading some users to suspect that the site had changed hands. Ross explained that he was changing his writing style to elude capture.
In November, Ross flew to Dominica, an island in the Caribbean known for being an easy place to secure “economic citizenship” (Roger Ver was also trying to obtain citizenship from the country). The small island offered a passport in exchange for a $75,000 donation. The sum was no problem for Ross and he began filling out the application on his laptop, listing his profession as “IT consulting.” A new passport would allow him to move that much further out of the reach of a government that he knew was chasing him.
He was, though, getting used to his new life. When he chatted with a Silk Road member, scout, who was thinking about joining his staff, Ross answered scout’s concerns about getting arrested by explaining why he believed it would be hard to ever get caught.
“put yourself in the shoes of a prosecutor trying to build a case against you,” he said in a chat with scout. “Realistically, the only way for them to prove anything would be for them to watch you log in and do your work.”
But Ross acknowledged how much even the small possibility weighed on him.
“the biggest con about this work is not the risk of going to jail or having your life disrupted,” he wrote; “it’s getting used to and living with that possibility no matter how remote.”
“and,” he added, “keeping your work a secret.”
By now he had been hardened enough that he knew how to keep things to himself. Even the friend he was living with and the girl he began dating didn’t know. The only people with whom he could be honest were the users and administrators of his site, who didn’t know his identity, and it was becoming increasingly hard to believe that he could trust even them. Silk Road forums were rife with debate about which users and vendors on the site were likely to be undercover cops. One of the most vigorous debates sprang up around a user named nob. Toward the end of 2012, nob put up a listing for a kilogram of cocaine for $27,000 in Bitcoins. nob had done almost no reviewed sales of drugs on the site and many other users were very suspicious.
“If this acct isn’t [law enforcement], it’s some other bullshit for sure,” a user named MC Haberdasher wrote on the forum. “I’d rather wake up from a heroin induced blackout sitting bitch in a car full of fat chicks listening to speed garage than even attempt to order from this guy.”
In this case, though, Ross trusted nob, who had slowly built a relationship with him over the course of the previous year. Ross decided to help nob sell his kilogram of cocaine, connecting him with one of the site administrators, chronicpain, who had been the first employee Ross hired back in 2011. The administrator was, in real life, Curtis Green, a forty-seven-year-old poker player and grandfather living just outside Salt Lake City.
Green found a buyer for nob’s cocaine and offered to receive the package at his home before sending it on to the buyer. The package was delivered to Green’s house on January 17, 2013. Just as he took it inside and was opening the package to check its contents, a SWAT team swarmed in. As the agents spread through the house, they found a stack of black, custom-made Bitcoin-mining machines. The floor around the computers, and in the rest of the house, was littered with hardened dog shit.
Even after Ross learned about Green’s arrest—and his release on bail—he did not assume that it was nob who had compromised the deal. Ross had always been somewhat skeptical about Green, believing that he was doing it for the money rather than the ideals. Ross asked nob (who he still believed was a powerful drug dealer) if he could have Green “beat up, then forced to send the Bitcoins he stole back.”
nob agreed to the proposition. But a day later, Ross changed his mind: “can you change the order to execute rather than torture?”
Ross explained to nob that he was concerned that Green would give the authorities information about Silk Road users, potentially jeopardizing the whole site and its grand mission. He said that he had “never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case.”
The federal agents who had Green in custody, and who were the undercover puppeteers behind the user nob, obliged by staging Green’s death (without actually killing him), and e-mailing bloody photos to Ross. When the photos came through, Ross responded that he was “a little disturbed, but I’m ok.”
“I’m new to this kind of thing is all,” he said, before quickly adding: “I don’t think I’ve done the wrong thing.”
The purported murder of Green was paid for with a transfer of $80,000 to a Capital One Bank account in Washington, DC. The money was sent through an anonymous money-transferring service in Australia that hid the location and identity of the sender. But the agents were already digging into the wealth of information on Green’s computers, seeking clues to find their way to their real quarry, Dread Pirate Roberts himself.