Operating on the dark web, Silk Road offered a range of illegal products, including drugs, counterfeit documents, and hacking tools. The marketplace operated under the guise of anonymity, utilizing Tor and Bitcoin to ensure the privacy and security of its users. Silk Road quickly became synonymous with the dark side of the internet, attracting significant media attention and raising concerns about the ethical implications of unregulated online marketplaces. Ulbricht created Silk Road out of a desire to have an open marketplace where people could buy and trade anything they wanted, without government regulation. To maintain users’ and his own anonymity, Ulbricht set up Silk Road on the dark web, a part of the internet invisible to traditional search engines. Silk Road did not accept cash or credit cards; users had to pay with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency.
Silk Road represented the new frontier of crime, a digital-era Wild West. As with the original frontier, Washington wanted to fence it in—and whoever brought law to the lawless would be a hero. Subdue the digital frontier and there was a star waiting for you, which was why the Silk Road case had become the largest online manhunt in history. Green had been on Silk Road for some time, and he’d chosen that screen name because of his own chronic pain, caused by a back injury he’d sustained while working as an EMT. On disability, Green had become an amateur pharmacologist, learning the ins and outs of opiates. Green had always been the hobbyist type, ever since his high school obsession with ham radios, which he used to talk to strangers all over the world, including astronauts on the International Space Station.
By Amelia Clarke
Dream Market was founded in late 2013, and officially shut down on April 30, 2019. A prolific Dream Market vendor was arrested in August 2017 with $500,000 in cryptocurrency on his laptop. The dark web marketplace allegedly amassed up to $168 million in annual revenue. Agora ran from 2013 to 2015, and it avoided the crackdown that saw the demise of Silk Road 2.0 and other dark web marketplaces.
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Federal agents had trailed Ulbricht from his modest house to the library, and arrested him while he was chatting online with what he thought was one of his employees, who was, in fact, an FBI agent sitting nearby. With Ulbricht logged on to his computer at a table in the science fiction section, two agents pretended to have a loud domestic spat behind him. When Ulbricht turned to watch them, a third agent leapt onto his open laptop, making sure he couldn’t close it. Had Ulbricht been able to shut that encrypted machine, investigators would never have been able to access its contents, establish that he was the man behind the empire, or prove that he was the mysterious Dread Pirate Roberts. The appeal also involved arguing that the Silk Road founder’s role was more akin to someone running a crack house rather than selling the crack inside it.
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“There are many, many dark web markets that arose out of Silk Road’s ashes in 2013. Dr Barratt’s research of Silk Road focused on the individuals using the first-of-its-kind deep web platform to buy illicit drugs and the social impacts it generated. Earlier on Tuesday, local time, the president delivered a scathing rebuke of countries like Canada, Mexico and China — who he accuses of facilitating the import of large amounts of the dangerous drug fentanyl into the US. Libertarian activists, who generally oppose criminal drug policies, have long believed that US government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social. Ulbricht, for his part, took to social media to celebrate Trump’s election victory and remind him of his promise.
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During the trial, prosecutors presented digital evidence that tied Ulbricht to Silk Road, including chat logs, server data, and journal entries. They also presented evidence of Ulbricht’s attempts to hire hitmen to kill individuals he believed were threatening Silk Road’s operations. Ulbricht’s decision to use the Tor network to hide Silk Road’s location also proved to be a mistake. While Tor provided anonymity, it also attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies, who viewed it as a haven for criminal activity.
We have all heard the stories, so why not explore the Dark Web for yourself? If all this seems like a total minefield, find out how to get started, plus 14 of the best dark web websites to explore in 2025. This article contains graphic images of injecting drug use. A picture may be worth … Indeed, as time wore on, it actually became somewhat of a competition amongst the various government agencies to be the one to finally identify the Silk Road mastermind. It began with a post made on a web forum where users discussed magic mushrooms.
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“…It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.” Trump moved swiftly to issue pardons following his second presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, including to 1,500 of his supporters (archived) who attacked the U.S. On Jan. 22, 2025, Trump announced Ulbricht’s pardon on Truth Social, calling (archived) his prison sentence “ridiculous.” Federal documentation confirmed the grant of clemency (archived). Clark and his defense attorney also spent much of their sentencing statements describing the abysmal conditions of his detention over the past several years in Thailand and then a New York jail. His attorney told the court he was traumatized by witnessing torture and sexual assault in a Thai jail, was denied basic health care, and arrived in the US weighing just 93 pounds.
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He was even accused of attempting to have at least five people killed because they threatened to reveal the truth behind Silk Road. Several darknet marketplaces currently exist that follow the Silk Road model, allowing anonymous cryptocurrency transactions on websites only accessible through dark web browsers. As the internet’s first widely used dark web market, Silk Road has a wild and seedy history, and it played a significant role in the emergence of Bitcoin. Learn all about Silk Road’s rise and fall and the dark web marketplaces that replaced it. Then, get a VPN to keep your online activity private and add a protective layer between yourself and the web’s darker side. Silk Road was the name of a platform used on the dark web to sell illegal goods, providing anonymity for those who required it for their activities.
- His arrest brought to an end what prosecutors described as a global, black market bazaar that for two years starting in 2011 was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214 million US worth of illegal drugs and other illicit services.
- “I had left my promising career as a scientist to be an investment adviser and entrepreneur and came up empty-handed.” Ross felt ashamed, but not long afterward Palmertree got a job in Dallas, leaving Good Wagon to Ross.
- That oversight exposed him, and a tax agent identified him in 2011, which led to the seizure of his laptop and Silk Road crypto as well as his eventual arrest and subsequent life sentence.
- Rather than a broad market place, today’s replacement markets are more likely to specialize in specific goods or a unique transaction system.
Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money-laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. As it operated as a Tor hidden service, users considered communications on Silk Road were entirely anonymous.
- Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking.
- A pale haze washed out the white-tipped Spanish Fork Peak rising above the valley.
- Green would be the first to admit that he was too chickenshit for suicide.
- With access to Ulbricht’s Google history, FBI agents discovered that his Gmail and Silk Road account activity did line up.
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They said the sentence would have been the same with or without the evidence presented. “Our criminal justice system should protect society from violent lawbreakers instead of filling our prisons with nonviolent offenders like Mr Ulbricht,” Paul wrote. Trump’s administration is expected to significantly reverse course on what had been a crackdown by regulators on the cryptocurrency sector during former Democratic president Joe Biden’s tenure. “He was a very keen libertarian. There was a book club, there was all this material about libertarian ideas and ideal and philosophies that Ross himself would lead these discussion around libertarianism,” Dr Barratt told the ABC.
Silk Road used Bitcoin for transactions, which allowed users to make payments with greater anonymity than traditional payment methods. Most products available on Silk Road were drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, and prescription medications. There are multiple estimates of how much money was generated by the site. Some estimates are that the site generated more than $1 billion in sales, but more conservative estimates place the figure at about $200 million. More than one million transactions are estimated to have occurred on the site in total, which had about 100,000 users.
