Ross Ulbricht.

Before Silk Road

Ross Ulbricht, a Texan, studied physics at the University of Texas at Dallas and then spent four years at Pennsylvania State University, according to his LinkedIn profile. By 2013 the profile set out a different ambition: to use economic theory to end the use of force by one person over another. “The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments,” he wrote, “so this is my current point of effort.”⁠^[6][11]

In a 2009 email he described the idea that became Silk Road: “an online storefront that couldn’t be traced back to [him]”, where customers could pay “anonymously and securely”. In 2010, his journal said, he began growing hallucinogenic mushrooms to sell on the site “for cheap to get people interested”. As interest grew in 2011, he wrote: “Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.”⁠^[3]

A market that took only bitcoin

Silk Road opened in about January 2011. It ran on Tor, a network that hides where internet traffic comes from, so the site and its users were hard to find, and the only money it accepted was bitcoin. Silk Road held each payment until the order arrived, kept a commission of 8 to 15 percent, and mixed payments through a “tumbler” that, it promised, made it “nearly impossible to link your payment with any coins leaving the site”.⁠^[1]

Most of what it sold was illegal drugs. In June 2011 the website Gawker described buying them there with bitcoins, which it called untraceable. Two US senators, Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin, read the story and wrote to the attorney general, calling bitcoin “an untraceable peer-to-peer currency” and urging him to “shut down the Silk Road network”. Jeff Garzik, one of Bitcoin’s developers, saw it differently. Every bitcoin payment is recorded in a public log, he told Gawker, so “attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin … is pretty damned dumb”.⁠^[7][8]

Around January 2012 the site’s leader took the name “Dread Pirate Roberts”, after a pirate in The Princess Bride whose name passes from one person to the next. Buyers needed bitcoins first, and some bought them on the site from a reseller, “BTCKing”, who got them through BitInstant, an exchange run by Charlie Shrem; Shrem later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison. By the time Silk Road closed, prosecutors said, its sales had come to more than 9.5 million bitcoins, and it had kept more than 600,000 in commissions.⁠^[3][9][1]

Arrest, trial and sentence

From 2011 investigators in Baltimore and New York hunted Silk Road’s anonymous leader, and at times suspected other people, among them Mark Karpelès, head of the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox; the Baltimore office later dropped that theory, the appeals court said. On 1 October 2013 federal agents arrested Ulbricht in a public library in San Francisco. An undercover agent had drawn Dread Pirate Roberts into a chat on Silk Road’s staff pages minutes earlier, and when agents seized Ulbricht’s laptop, that chat was open on its screen. Silk Road was shut down.⁠^[3]

On his computers agents found a bitcoin wallet holding about 144,336 bitcoins. With about 29,655 taken from Silk Road’s servers, prosecutors called it the largest bitcoin seizure ever. The US Marshals Service sold them at auction between June 2014 and November 2015. The appeals court later described bitcoin as “an anonymous but traceable digital currency”: its addresses carry no names, but every payment is logged in the blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain., the record all bitcoin users share.⁠^{[1][3][12][13]}

Other coins taken from Silk Road were traced years later. In 2020 prosecutors seized about 69,370 bitcoins from a hacker known in court papers as “Individual X”, who, they said, had stolen them from the site and never spent them, despite Ulbricht’s threats. In 2021 agents found about 50,000 more at the home of James Zhong, some on a small computer hidden in a popcorn tin. Zhong pleaded guilty to wire fraud for tricking Silk Road into releasing them in 2012, and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.⁠^[14][15][16]

Ulbricht’s trial in Manhattan began on 13 January 2015. His lawyers accepted that he had created Silk Road, but argued that he had handed it to others after a few months and had been lured back to take the blame as investigators closed in. Two federal agents from the Baltimore investigation had stolen bitcoins while working on the case, one of them by selling Dread Pirate Roberts fake inside information. The judge kept evidence of his conduct out of the trial; both agents later pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice.⁠^[3][5]

On 4 February 2015 the jury found Ulbricht guilty on all seven counts, among them distributing narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking and conspiring to launder money. Before sentencing he wrote to the judge, Katherine B. Forrest, calling Silk Road a “terrible mistake”. “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age,” he wrote. In court he told her: “I’m not the man I was when I created Silk Road.”⁠^[2][3][11]

On 29 May 2015 Forrest sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole and ordered him to forfeit $183,961,921. Parents of two people who had died after taking drugs bought on Silk Road spoke at the hearing. She told him: “It was a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus.”⁠^[10][11]

The murder-for-hire allegations

Some of the evidence at the trial concerned crimes Ulbricht was not charged with. Prosecutors presented evidence that Dread Pirate Roberts had paid to have five people killed to protect Silk Road: a vendor who threatened to publish users’ names and addresses, and four others. The appeals court wrote that “while the evidence demonstrates that Ulbricht ordered and paid substantial sums for the murders, there is no evidence that the killings actually took place”. Prosecutors believed the man he paid, a Silk Road user called Redandwhite, had tricked him.⁠^[3]

The judge weighed that evidence at sentencing. Ulbricht said he had only fantasised about the murders; Forrest found the evidence that he had commissioned them “ample and unambiguous”. A separate indictment in Maryland, filed in 2013, did charge him with attempted witness murder, over a plot against a former Silk Road worker whose “killing” had been faked by one of the two agents. In July 2018, with his New York conviction final, the US Attorney for Maryland, Robert Hur, said: “We have dismissed the federal charges based on the same conduct pending against Mr. Ulbricht in Maryland.” Ulbricht was never tried on any murder-for-hire charge.⁠^[3][17][18]

The debate over his sentence

On 31 May 2017 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the conviction and the life sentence. “Reasonable people may and do disagree about the social utility of harsh sentences” for drug crimes, the judges wrote, but “under the law, we cannot say that its decision was substantively unreasonable.” On 28 June 2018 the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case.⁠^[3][4]

Libertarians and cryptocurrency supporters held up his case as an example of government overreach, Al Jazeera reported: he had been punished for other people’s transactions, they argued, and the punishment did not fit the crime. His lawyers had argued that Silk Road made the drug trade safer, with seller ratings and no street deals. His appeal against the life sentence was backed by groups including the Drug Policy Alliance and by a retired federal judge, Nancy Gertner.⁠^[23][11][3]

Prosecutors saw “a drug dealer and criminal profiteer”, in the words of the US Attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, who linked six deaths to drugs bought on the site, and Forrest called the safety argument “so very narrow”: Silk Road, she said, had been about “creating demand”.⁠^[10][11]

Libertarian activists campaigned for his release, many of them holding “Free Ross” signs. On 25 May 2024, speaking to the Libertarian Party’s national convention, Donald Trump promised: “If you vote for me, on day one I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.” On 21 January 2025, his first full day back in office, Trump posted that he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her he had signed “a full and unconditional pardon”. Ulbricht was freed that month, after more than 11 years in prison.⁠^{[22][19][20][21][23]}

The pardon revived the argument. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, called it “a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to his crimes”. Jeffrey Singer, a drug-policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, told NPR that Trump’s pardons often appeared “transactional”: “That was a promise he made hoping to get support from Libertarians.”⁠^[23][24]

Ulbricht thanked Trump in a video soon after his release: “I’m a free man now. So let it be known that Donald Trump is a man of his word.” At the end of May 2025, ten years after he was sentenced, he gave his first public speech, at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “Bitcoin’s power comes from the fact that any one of us can mine if we choose to, and any one of us can generate addresses if we choose to,” he said.⁠^[23][25]