Drug trafficking, philosophy and high tech rarely come together. But the story of the legendary Silk Road market, which worked on the “dark web” for almost three years, is just one of these rare cases.

At the beginning of 2011, the Gawker blog wrote about a very unusual tech startup - so to speak, an underground market where illegal goods are traded, among which drugs occupy the first place. “Silk Road is like Amazon, if Amazon sold psychotropic drugs,” says the article that launched Silk Road into fame.

Silk Road perfectly follows the model of modern startups: young private business, which uses the latest technology to make the lives of its users “easier”; they gladly pay for the convenience, and this allows the inventors to become fabulously rich. Only “convenience” in this case means “buy cocaine and not get beaten and robbed,” technology means anonymous proxies and the “dark web,” wealth means a series of Bitcoin hashes, and the exit strategy for entrepreneurs in this case sounds like “don’t please.” to jail". With this, however, there was a slight misfire.

Very big and very black

Silk Road has never published its statistics, but according to rough estimates, at the beginning of 2013, it offered about ten thousand types of products, of which 70 percent were drugs, and the rest were weapons, fake documents, counterfeit products, etc. In total, about 340 types of narcotic substances could be found on the site.

There are different estimates of how much money passed through Silk Road, but, for example, an estimate for the first half of 2012 was about $15 million per month. At the beginning of 2013, analysts estimated Silk Road's monthly turnover at $30–40 million.

Silk Road owes its existence to two things: the electronic currency Bitcoin and the distributed anonymizer Tor. As you know, Tor can hide not only the identity of site visitors, but, if necessary, the site itself: the link to it will end in .onion, and you cannot open it with a simple browser. Sites hidden in this way are often called the “darknet,” and for obvious reasons, one has to resort to these distribution channels in cases where there is something to hide.

The history of Silk Road's popularity began around the same time when the world first learned about Bitcoin - in 2009–2011. And it was the anonymous electronic currency that made it possible to make the purchase of drugs as safe as possible.

The Gawker article details a typical use case for the site, and except for the product, it's very similar to a typical online shopping experience: “A customer wants to order a hundred micrograms of acid through an ad on Silk Road. He found a seller with a lot of positive comments and clearly competent. Then I added acid to my cart and proceeded to the payment process. Then you just need to indicate the delivery address and pay fifty bitcoins.” Note that in 2011 this amount was equal to 150 dollars, and now it is already fifteen thousand greenbacks. Buyers of that time must regret spending much more than ordinary drug lovers - but, of course, not as much as a person who once bought a pizza for ten thousand bitcoins, or three million dollars at the current exchange rate.

It turns out that another reason for the popularity of Silk Road lies in the relatively reliable rating system, which allows us to cut off a significant part of scammers. By the way, for the same purposes, the site administration requires all sellers to make a deposit before opening their virtual shop. On the one hand, this gave way to competing sites (of which there were soon a great many), but on the other hand, it supported Silk Road’s reputation as the most reliable way to stock up on illegal drugs.

Unknown fathers

So who created Silk Road? Until recently, details about the site's founders were very scarce. Some details were found out by a journalist from Forbes, who in early August 2013 contacted the chief administrator through the Silk Road forum, who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts (Dread Pirate Roberts, in honor of the character from the novel and film of the same name “The Princess Bride”). He did not reveal any details about himself, but shared some information about the site.

As it turned out, Dread Pirate Roberts is not the first owner of Silk Road, and the real creator of the market only handed over the reins to him, after which he retired with the money he had previously earned. Roberts's career turn from hacker to drug lord followed the same pattern in which former hackers sometimes become security experts at large firms: he found a vulnerability, which he notified the site owner. He, as often happens, did not want to communicate at first, but then admitted that a hole through which it was possible to find out information about customers existed and needed to be sealed.

Of course, Roberts is not running the site alone - it takes a lot of effort to ensure smooth operation. The owner of Silk Road in an interview spoke very flatteringly about the community of active users who are always ready to help with advice. Employees are also hired from the community: there have been cases when the administration posted real vacancies on the forum.

According to Roberts, one of the ongoing concerns of site administrators is the ongoing attacks. They can come both from competitors and from those who want to hit the big jackpot and take over Silk Road’s money. Moreover, we are not talking about DDoS (such attacks via Tor, if possible, are difficult), but often about zero-day exploits.

Handling bitcoins also requires caution: so that transaction chains cannot be tracked on the blockchain, their laundering (or rather, mixing) was carried out on a large scale. After this procedure, it turns out to be impossible to find out that the sellers received their bitcoins from Silk Road.

Political side of the issue

“You have already sold weapons and it seems you are going to resume the practice. Are there things you definitely won’t trade?” - a Forbes reporter asks the Dread Pirate Roberts. And it turns out that he has a formulated answer.

It is possible to sell weapons needed for self-defense. But weapons that are clearly intended to harm innocent people (for example, those that can be used against a crowd, or weapons of mass destruction) are prohibited on Silk Road. Trade in stolen goods, counterfeit money and other fraudulent paraphernalia, child pornography and the services of hired killers is also prohibited. Any other goods - as many as you like.

Roberts is not at all ashamed of his occupation: in his opinion, people are free to do whatever they want with their health, as long as they do not harm others. Moreover, he considers the black market he supports to be a harbinger of a future where free trade will free people from the need to obey any authority. This anarcho-libertarian movement is called "agorism", and its supporters oppose participation in political life and for free economic relations. News of the rise of anonymous electronic currencies and black markets should be music to an agorist's ears.

The ideology behind Silk Road finds a certain response in society. For example, the famous science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, in the article “The Dread Pirate Nemo: the essence of Silk Road is not drugs,” compares the owner of Silk Road with Captain Nemo - a brilliant inventor and at the same time a renegade fighting the colonial regime. “I wouldn’t pay attention to this whole story if it was just another fellow Texan of mine who sold a lot of drugs. But no: people like the Dread Pirate Roberts aren't half as satisfied with the drug trade. "The Dread Pirate Roberts is a dreamer of Juulverne proportions," writes Sterling.

Successful countermeasures

Since states are not going to surrender to the mercy of anarchists in the near future and the sale of drugs is still prohibited, the police have long been monitoring the activities of Silk Road and looking for ways to get to both the dealers and the administration.

The first person to be arrested for purchasing on Silk Road was an Australian who ordered cocaine and MDMA to be delivered by mail in February 2013. The package was intercepted, illegal substances were seized, and the house and computer were searched. However, these actions did not give any access to the sellers.

The next one was a supplier with a long list of drugs that he dispensed, as you might guess, without the need to present a prescription. His arrest, however, did not surprise anyone: judging by messages on the Silk Road forum, the seller was too careless and calmly disclosed his home address to all buyers - even despite the fact that they pointed out the mistake to him.

This story, in addition to its general instructiveness, is notable for the fact that the US Drug Enforcement Administration then seized bitcoins for the first time - the dealer had eleven of them. No one still knows how exactly the police seize bitcoins.

The real news broke on October 2, 2013. Then the FBI managed to take over the Silk Road servers and shut down the market. As it later became known, the servers were located in Iceland, Latvia, Romania and one in the USA.

How the FBI managed to determine the location of the servers is not reported. However, data copied from an Icelandic server by the Reykjavik police allowed agents to go even further. Having studied the archive of correspondence, they de-anonymized (and then arrested) the person who was considered the owner of Silk Road. At the same time, his savings in bitcoins, equivalent to $28.5 million, were also seized.

Dread Pirate IRL

Until the court considers the case, it would be incorrect to assert that the arrested twenty-nine-year-old Ross Ulbricht is the legendary Dread Pirate Roberts. And yet, the police had a lot of strong evidence in their hands.

At Ulbricht's home, police found a fake driver's license with a photograph and the correct date of birth of the suspect, but a different last name. The unsealed correspondence mentioned just such a document: Ulbricht asked his colleagues to get him a fake ID that he could present when renting servers.

Other clues that emerged as police took a closer look at Ulbricht pointed to a connection between Ross Ulbricht and the Dread Pirate Roberts. Thus, the owner of Silk Road was once looking for a Bitcoin specialist and left the address of Ulbricht’s Gmail account in a message.

Ulbricht's libertarian beliefs and lifestyle also confirm the FBI's assumption. He stayed with a friend for a long time in San Francisco (where, by the way, he was 500 meters from the cafe, from whose IP the Dread Pirate Roberts account was accessed), then rented a room in another house. His neighbors told police that “Josh” (as Ross Ulbricht called himself) was always sitting in his room on the computer.

In his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht says that since graduating from university, he has been developing “a simulation that would allow people to experience what it is like to live in a world without the coercion of governments and institutions.” Silk Road fits this description quite well.

The FBI report reveals interesting new details regarding Silk Road. It turned out that during its existence the site sold goods worth approximately $1.2 billion and brought its owners about $80 million (the rate was taken at approximately $130 to one bitcoin - by the time this article was written, the figure had doubled). Silk Road's salaried administrators received salaries ranging from $1,000 to $2,000 per week. But the most interesting thing was found in the Dread Pirate's correspondence.

Loser Killer

The first of the episodes, which showed Roberts (and, according to the FBI, Ulbricht) in a less than favorable light, lasted from January to March 2013. An FBI agent made a successful attempt to infiltrate the Silk Road structure and identified himself to Roberts as a major drug dealer who wanted to contact a serious distributor. Ulbricht, convinced that he was dealing with a drug lord, contacted the FBI agent with the right person, and he gave the address for delivery. Only now, instead of cocaine, a police squad arrived at the specified address and put the dealer behind bars.

Roberts' next action can only be described as comical. Having learned of the arrest and worried that his employee might talk too much to the cops, Roberts could not think of anything better than to try to order his murder from the fake drug lord who started the problems. The FBI agent turned out to be a useless killer: he took 40 thousand dollars, sent a fake photograph and declared that the job was done and the body had been successfully disposed of. The Silk Road employee was in custody at the time.

The next similar story happened almost immediately after the first - in March 2013. A message was sent to Dread Pirate Roberts in which a user under the pseudonym FriendlyChemist wrote that he had opened the computer of one of the major Silk Road vendors and stole a register with the physical addresses of customers. If the site administrator does not pay 500 thousand dollars, these addresses will be published. The need for money was explained simply: Friendly Chemist could not pay another dealer, who had had no connection with Silk Road until that moment. Attached to the letter was the password for the hacked account and an excerpt from the stolen address database.

In response to the blackmail, the Dread Pirate Roberts asked to be put in touch directly with the disgruntled creditor. He really soon showed up on Silk Road, and Roberts, firstly, immediately offered him cooperation, and secondly, a reward for the murder of the Friendly Chemist. A bargaining ensued, during which the unknown businessman asked for 150 thousand dollars, and Roberts claimed that he had already paid 80 thousand for such work (although the FBI report was about forty). As a result, Roberts had to agree to 150 thousand, transfer it (via Bitcoin, of course) and provide the mercenary with Khimik’s address in Canada, where he allegedly lived in a house with his wife and three children.

Over the next 24 hours, Roberts received confirmation that the job was completed and a photograph to prove it. However, the photograph was destroyed immediately after receiving it, and the appeal of the FBI investigator who read Roberts’ correspondence to the Canadian police yielded nothing: not only did they not find records of the murder on the desired day, but they also did not find information about the alleged victim. So, if a second contract killing did occur, there is no evidence of it yet.

Silk Road 2.0

The matter did not end with Ulbricht's arrest. The police then went after the main Silk Road sellers and have already arrested several. One lived in Washington state and dealt in cocaine, heroin and high-quality methamphetamines, another was caught in the UK for trafficking marijuana, the third and fourth were found and detained by Swedish police.

Silk Road's competitors could have perked up after the loss of their leader, but the effect was the opposite. The second largest site after SR, called Atlantis, closed “due to technical reasons,” but soon a rumor began to spread that its owners simply decided to retire in time, grabbing the remaining bitcoins in user accounts. The Atlantis administration soon appeared with an apology, but it is unknown whether the problem with the refund was resolved.

The administrator of the Project Black Flag site made it easier: he curtailed trading and posted a message that he panicked and stole all the bitcoins. The Black Market Reloaded market, meanwhile, experienced a different problem: one of its administrators decided to publish the source code of the site. Because of this, Black Market Reloaded was first closed, but then reopened, making sure that no one initially found critical vulnerabilities in the code.

But the most significant event is the return of Silk Road itself, only at a new address and with improved security: buyers will now use PGP keys for authorization. This is where the differences from the previous version end: it looks like one of the administrators had a backup of Silk Road in stock. Moreover, this administrator immediately announced that his name was also Dread Pirate Roberts and that trading would resume as if nothing had happened.

The conclusions from this story are twofold. On the one hand, it is clear that “you can’t strangle this song, you can’t kill it” and trade in the forbidden will continue on a grand scale as long as there is a combination of anonymous currency and anonymous trading platform. On the other hand, the police, as we see, are also capable of something: they may not act quickly, but the tycoons of the online drug trade can hardly count on the fact that a chain of eight anonymous proxies is all that is needed for carefree prosperity .

Although Silk Road only existed for two years, it had a significant impact on the closed part of the Internet. Here are a few facts worth knowing about the workings of the largest project on the Tor network.

Tor is an anonymous network, allowing you to establish a connection protected from eavesdropping. Thanks to this, users and site owners can avoid government interference, censorship, anti-piracy laws and other restrictions. In August, the owner of the largest anonymous hosting service, Freedom Hosting, was arrested (he was charged with distributing child pornography). This year, the Russian Internet library “Flibusta” moved to the .onion domain.

In 2011, a person under the nickname Dread Pirate Roberts (inspired by the film The Princess Bride) created the Silk Road platform, where you can anonymously buy or sell more than 10,000 items, mainly illegal drugs. At the same time, trade in weapons, child pornography, bank cards, and personal data was prohibited by the rules.

In late August the founder gave an in-depth interview to Forbes (still without revealing his name). He spoke about the structure of business and his libertarian views. “What we do is not sell drugs and cause problems for other people. We fight for people's rights, and Silk Road is a mechanism for broadcasting our message. Everything else is secondary,” he said. According to one version, it was this interview that led the police to the entrepreneur’s trail. However, even before this, Ulbricht left traces of himself - on the programmers’ website Stack Overflow he asked about how to use Tor, and through Google+ tried to find someone who works for DHL, UPS or FedEX.

Purchase and sale of goods on the site was carried out through the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It can be bought at special sites, the most popular of which is Mt. Gox. When Silk Road was launched in 2011, the rate was at $9; in April 2013, Bitcoin was already worth $299.

After the police found out the real name of the owner - Ross William Ulbricht - and arrested him, 26,000 bitcoins were seized for a record amount of $3.6 million. The “Pirate” was caught trying to send a package to San Francisco with nine fake documents, which he planned to use to rent new servers.

After two years of work Silk Road's turnover amounted to $1.2 billion. As of July 23, 2013, 957,079 users were registered in the online store.

Dread Pirate Roberts (the alias of Ross William Ulbricht) may be facing a life sentence, but experts and shoppers say the world has changed and online marketplaces for illicit items are here to stay.

Screenshot of the closed Silk Road website showing previews of supposedly products for sale
One gram of black heroin. Price: 0.5 bitcoins or about $118.

In the photo, he, dark and exotic, is captured next to a needle and a pocket knife, for scale. Under the photo, users left rave reviews: “5/5 - Arrived quickly. Discreet, precise weight. Clear product. A perfect purchase as always."

“5/5 - Even in this chaos, he sent my order quickly and discreetly. The product is fire as usual. Thank you."

"5/5 - 48 hours as usual, you guys are great."

Other drugs and related products are no less popular: 20 tablets of the analeptic modafinil For 0.08 BTC or just under $20. A pack of 10 tablets of Cialis, an erection drug, costs just under $30. Two hundred tablets of diazepam - an analogue of Valium - $110.

This is Agora, an online supermarket for drugs and other illegal and semi-legal goods and services. One of many that emerged after the collapse of Silk Road, the first major darknet marketplace, and the arrest of its founder, Ross William Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts.

On Friday in Manhattan federal court, Ulbricht was sentenced to multiple life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. Before the hearing, prosecutors wrote in a letter to Judge Katherine Forrest that a harsh sentence would be a deterrent to those thinking about creating online marketplaces, and naturally Forrest agreed.

But no matter how the government tries to stop it, Pandora's box is already open.

When Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in 2013, it was virtually the only one of its kind. Buying and selling drugs online is nothing new - there have always been lists with code words on sites such as Craigslist in the US and Gumtree in the UK. An ordinary drug trade that clumsily ended up on the Internet.

But founded in 2011, Silk Road was something more. Using the Tor encryption service and pricing in Bitcoin, he promised a new level of security - from both law enforcement and scammers. Sellers received ratings from users similar to sites like Ebay, manufacturers who failed to deliver received negative reviews, and users knew to stay away from them.

Although Silk Road was drug-friendly, it still had a moral code. Child pornography, stolen credit cards, guns, and pay-to-kill were banned but available on other sites located even deeper on the dark web.

The story of physicist Ross Ulbricht, who created Silk Road - an anonymized analogue of large marketplaces where users could trade anything. Naturally, the state did not like this...

"Behind Last year I went through a lot in my personal life, I left a promising career in physics to try my hand at trading and business. And as a result, I was left with nothing,” - 2010 began unsuccessfully for 26-year-old Ross Ulbricht, the future founder of the largest online store of prohibited goods. His partner left the business, agreeing to a routine job with a stable salary. Ross began running Good Wagon Books on his own, a service that collected used books and sold them through Amazon. At first everything went well, in December he even earned $10,000.

But then everything collapsed. And in the literal sense. Late in the evening, Ross was alone in the book warehouse when he suddenly heard an incredible crash. All the shelves folded like dominoes because Ulbricht, who himself invented the system for fastening them, forgot to screw in the two nuts that held the entire structure together.

Ross closed the business without regret - by that time he had already come up with Silk Road. In his diary, he wrote: “The idea is to create a site where people can buy anything anonymously and without leaving any trace.” He placed the site on the so-called dark web - a part of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by traditional search engines like Google. To get there, you need to use special software.

Ulbricht launched Silk Road in January 2011 and became the first user of the system. Possessing fairly simple technologies for growing psilocybin mushrooms, he began selling prohibited goods for bitcoins. The first deal was concluded a few days after the launch. Since there were no analogues to the site, within a few months, when the mushrooms grown by Ross ran out, other drug sellers turned Silk Road into a full-fledged online store. From each transaction, Ulbricht received a commission in bitcoins.

Within a year, Silk Road looked like Amazon and eBay, with user profiles, product listings, and transaction reviews. The Tor program provided virtual anonymity, and drug packages were often sent through regular mail. There was no need to hide - if anything happened, the recipient could evade the law by saying that he did not order anything like that. In addition, there was a “Seller’s Guide” on the website, which clearly explained how to pack the product in order to hide it from electronic sensors and dogs. Most purchases reached the customer, and the Silk Road assortment grew to 13,000 items. A buffet for connoisseurs: flaky Colombian cocaine, strawberry LSD, Afghan heroin No. 4 and so on.

Ulbricht did not seek to legalize the business and did not feel any remorse. On the contrary, he was confident that he was promoting libertarian ideas - in particular, that drug use is a personal choice. Users of the resource wanted even more freedom and waited for the range to expand to other prohibited goods, but Ross referred to a “strict code of conduct”: “Our basic rule is to treat others the way we want to be treated.” Therefore, there was no child porn, guns or human organs on the site.

Ross called for “stop sponsoring states with your taxes and direct your creative energy to the black market.” He regarded every transaction through Silk Road as “a step towards universal freedom.” Ross renamed himself from administrator to Dread Pirate Roberts, a character from William Goldman's book The Princess Bride. Tens of thousands of Silk Road fans recognized Ulbricht as the Steve Jobs of the “dark internet,” and leading media wrote about the Silk Road phenomenon and interviewed Ulbricht through encrypted messengers.

All this led to a huge increase in the popularity of Silk Road. Over the two and a half years of its existence, about a million buyers have used the platform. By June 2013, almost a million people had registered on the site. The total turnover exceeded one billion dollars.

Ross Ulbricht

All this could not go unnoticed by the intelligence services. The FBI team searching for the founder of Silk Road was led by a young employee, Chris Tarbell. His first big success was the identification of Hector Javier Monsegur, co-founder of LulzSec, a group of hackers that attacked major American websites, including News Corp. and the CIA. After his arrest, Tarbell was looking for a new big business and became interested in the Tor program, which provides encrypted data transfer. Before Tarbell, all cybercrime investigations relied on Tor, and the agent vowed to defeat it.

For several months, Tarbell and the team studied Tor to no avail, until information about the leak of the Silk Road IP address was published on Reddit. The Dread Pirate Roberts knew about this, but did not consider it necessary to do anything. Success turned his head, and he assured his colleagues that the server would never be discovered anyway. But Tarbell was too persistent: he began entering usernames with incorrect passwords (and vice versa). An unsophisticated selection method and an error on the site revealed the real IP address of Silk Road. The server and mirror of the site ended up in Reykjavik. Icelandic authorities handed over the keys to the mirror to Tarbell. Silk Road was in his hands.

The amount of funds in the Dread Pirate Roberts' account amazed the agent. In one day, July 21, 2013, it received 3,237 transfers totaling $19,459. In annual terms, this is $7 million.

Ross didn't spend the money on himself. He told his comrades that he was saving them for the libertarian revolution. Transferring confidence to his colleagues, he tried to solve constantly arising technical and management problems. It was extremely difficult for Ross to increase the number of administrators, since it was never known whether an anonymous person could be trusted. He had to do a significant part of the work himself, although he lacked knowledge in programming.

Along with profits, costs also increased. Hackers constantly attacked Silk Road, and Ross spent $50,000 a week to neutralize them. But this did not help: in May 2013, due to such attacks, the site was down for a week. In the end, he decided to fix the problem radically and ordered the murder of the five main hackers. After receiving photographic evidence, he was confident that they would never hack anyone again.

Only at the trial did Ulbricht learn that he had entrusted the murders to the hackers themselves.

The Dread Pirate Roberts was too lazy to think about his safety all the time. Increasing vanity became his weakness. He was confident in his invincibility, which he constantly told his comrades. Ross didn't know that main mistake he has already admitted it. IRS employee Gary Alford guessed that the founder of Silk Road should have started promoting the site on sites with a similar audience. He searched for links to Tor IP addresses from the era of Silk Road and found that on January 27, 2011, on the website Shroomery.org, someone named Altoid advertised a new platform for anonymously buying and selling any goods.

A simple Google search for the nickname Altoid brought me to Stack Overflow. It shows a man with mail [email protected] was interested technical features Tor. A search of the FBI databases revealed that Ross Ulbricht was always located near the Dread Pirate Roberts' exit sites in Silk Road.

Ross, who was living in San Francisco at the time, was placed under surveillance. He loved to work in the cafe and library near his home. There he was caught red-handed: he was logged into Silk Road under the account of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

At the trial, Ulbricht did not admit his guilt and until the last insisted that he was a simple Silk Road user. However, the jury unanimously, after just four hours of deliberation, found him guilty of seven counts, including drug trafficking, money laundering and hacking.

Cover photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC

For better or worse, the site has been a fixture in the Bitcoin economy ever since Bitcoin gained media attention in early 2011. Online service of black market services for the purchase of substances, pirated digital goods, books on how to hack a computer and on the production of medicines and not so drugs, counterfeits. The service combines the Ebay (or Bitmit) user interface, a guarantor system, and a Bitcoin wallet that mixes all incoming and outgoing coins to hide the original source. The Silk Road site operates completely anonymously, appearing in the outside world only as a hidden service on the Tor network, run by a user known as "Dread Pirate Roberts." The site keeps members and their locations secret by combining two technologies. The first technology is "Tor", funded by American army. It is an anonymous Internet service designed to help dissidents in authoritarian regimes evade the prying eyes of their government. The second technology is called Bitcoin Using this technology it is extremely difficult to trace connections between buyers and sellers.

Attracts people for many reasons. Some visitors are simply interested in a safe and convenient way to buy and sell illegal items, of which “medicinal” drugs are in particular demand. Other users cite additional costs when using other sites. In his review of Silk Road, writer Gwern claimed that he found the drug Adderall at a much better price per pill than one of his friends from his college days had told him (less than 1/3 the price). Moreover, according to others, Silk Road, in its ideological mission, is much more meaningful than just a site about goods.

The aforementioned site administrator actively promotes libertarian political principles on his forum. What this comes down to is that there is a clear understanding that fining and imprisoning people for taking certain substances is the wrong way to deal with it. The crypto-anarchist movement, which seeks to eliminate the ability of individuals and institutions to have power over others, also finds appeal in this service. As the government continues to try to legislate SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), the attractiveness of using the Tor network only increases. Finally, there are some legal products available for sale on even those who are not interested in using Silk Road. So, bypassing the laws, the site provides a service to a community where entrepreneurs can grow their businesses online and earn extra income from the comfort of their own home.

The public first became aware of Silk Road on June 1, 2011, when an article on the site provided a detailed overview of the site’s services and the number of its users exceeded ten thousand. A few days later, the US government became aware of the site's popularity. Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin called for the website to be shut down, arguing that "never before has a site been so open in distributing drugs online" and that "by taking down the site, we will help stop the flow of these drugs flooding our city." After this, Silk Road fades into the background, but on June 9 the site again attracts attention. This time, the economic properties of Bitcoin are being negatively assessed. Everything was aggravated by the security crisis, due to unrelated events that began at the end of June and continued until August, when bitomat.pl was hacked, as was the first online Bitcoin wallet - MyBitcoin, disappearing with 51% of its users' deposits.

As a result, the price of Bitcoin on Silk Road fell from $31 to $2 between June and November, making it harder to make money. However, the service has retained loyal fans and users. Ultimately, Bitcoin's loyal fans were rewarded, and the price stabilized in early 2012. The number of accounts is currently about 22,000, the recorded maximum number of people simultaneously on the site is currently 126. About three-quarters of the site's users are residents of the United States, with significantly fewer British and European users. One of the reasons for this is the relative ease of purchasing bitcoins in the United States, as well as the high degree of interest in “medical products”. But Silk Road alone is not enough to satisfy the needs of its non-American customers. For example, Silk Road users have the option to see prices in BTC or USD, but not in any other currency. This is especially problematic for non-US sellers because they, unlike sellers who are based in the US, do not have the choice of setting the price of their goods, which is fixed in their national currency. Language is the next problem, since the site does not have a choice of language, there are not even local subforums for communication in languages ​​other than English.

So far there have been no reports of any arrests as a result of the site's activities, and there is good reason to believe that while the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) continues to monitor Silk Road, they are not very actively trying to find buyers or sellers . Silk Road user vlad1m1r, who operates strictly within the legal framework of selling bitcoins in exchange for cash by mail in the UK, believes that monitoring the site on a daily basis is an ineffective method, “as it is simply an inefficient use of resources due to the anonymous nature of the Tor network and using GPG encrypted messages to exchange personal information. Users sometimes assume that law enforcement is the supplier, but I highly doubt that a police officer would sell drugs in order to catch people red-handed." The last statement about a police officer selling drugs is a violation of human rights and is legally punishable. Law enforcement defines infringement as “when a person is induced by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he or she had no prior intent to commit.” Someone actively searching for drug listings on Silk Road would likely not fit this definition. However, the theory that it is not worth the resources spent searching on Silk Road is valid. Law enforcement, who are more interested in mitigating the social consequences of dealers and gangs on the streets than in establishing formal prohibitions, may have decided to leave Silk Road only because buying drugs online is much safer than looking elsewhere.

The relationship between users of the Silk Road website and its management is positive. User vlad1m1r explains that there are cases when a client is dissatisfied and complains, for example, that a “branch” was accidentally deleted or that the Silk Road administrator himself did not deign to show interest in the problem. But, as a rule, users communicate politely, ask for new products, or for help in working with the site, and administrators almost always reciprocate. One of the factors that contributes to the cohesion of the Silk Road site is high level trust. Fraud is a serious problem due to the anonymity of participants. The fact that turning to the police for help necessarily implies admitting to committing a crime makes Silk Road one of the few russers that try to counteract this, using a reputation system and a built-in guarantor system.

However, one of the main disagreements among service users is the moral component. There have been cases where photographs have been published that are classified as child pornography in some countries, but are considered acceptable in other countries. The administration of the Silk Road website strives to adhere to its own moral philosophy in such cases, not banning photographs involving minors, but strictly prohibiting products that actually violate generally accepted rules. It is also worth mentioning requests for skimming devices for credit cards, the purchase of which is not allowed on the site. Some people believe that this is tantamount to counterfeit medicine. An equally important issue is the topic of weapons. Site administrator Dread Pirate Roberts eventually decided that people with similar requests should be blocked from accessing the Silk Road site, but allowed access to a sister site called The Armory. Services such as theft and contract killings are completely prohibited on Silk Road and The Armory, although some users list buyers who are interested in such goods on competing sites with no moral restrictions at all, such as Black Market Reloaded. .

Another, less controversial issue relates to the topic of the guarantor system. The method for making transactions on the site is simple for the buyer - you need to send your funds not to the seller himself, but to the guarantor system, which notifies the seller that he has received the money and the transfer of funds was successful. When the buyer receives his product, he notifies the guarantor system that the transaction was successful and the seller receives his money. Some sellers ask their customers to bypass this mechanism and send the money directly to them. This method has not received approval from the site administration and the community, but, nevertheless, sometimes they resort to it. On April 20, many sellers celebrated the first birthday of the service. The celebration took place by organizing special sales of their products at reduced prices. One seller with the nickname Tony76 managed to use this opportunity to collect a large number of orders, then he disappeared with the money. There are several assumptions about how much money Tony76 was able to steal. What is known is that he transferred $30,000 worth of bitcoins from the site. Since then, the use of the guarantor system has gained popularity, and there are also discussions about making this system mandatory.

Outside the site, there are different opinions about "Silk Road". Some believe that Bitcoin's economy would be better without such services that tarnish its reputation. It would also be better for presenting Bitcoin as a means of legal payments. At the same time, others consider the shadow economy to be a launching pad for Bitcoin, or see such an economy as an end in itself. By size, the site is now the largest e-commerce platform in Bitcoin, with on average twice as many products as its largest legal competitor, bitmit.net. But in terms of turnover volumes in the Bitcoin economy, Sik Road is still far from being an economic giant, unlike such enterprises as Butterfly Labs and BitInstant that claim to be. Both supporters of crypto-anarchist freedom and those who care about the image of Bitcoin can be sure that the Silk Road site is still far from capturing the Bitcoin economy, but the site still successfully continues its existence.

P.S.
How to get to the Sik Road website?

You need to install the TOR client. TOR does not require installation on your computer, but runs out of the box. After TOR is launched, enter the address silkroadvb5piz3r.onion in the browser that opens. If this is the first time, click on the link below “click here to join” and register.

We warn you that this site may contain content prohibited in your country, for this reason we do not recommend visiting this site, the address is provided purely for informational purposes =)