Ross Ulbricht Concepts

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

by Nick Bilton · 15 Mar 2017 · 349pp · 109,304 words

. —Walter White, aka Heisenberg, Breaking Bad Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Author’s Note Cast of Characters PART I 1. The Pink Pill 2. Ross Ulbricht 3. Julia Vie 4. The Debate 5. Jared’s Khat 6. The Bonfire 7. The Silk Road 8. Ross the Farmer 9. Opening Day of

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conversations. With that, I promise all will be revealed at the end. It always is. Cast of Characters The Silk Road The Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) Variety Jones, consigliere and mentor (Roger Thomas Clark) Nob, drug dealer and henchman (Carl Force, DEA) ChronicPain, forum moderator (Curtis Green, Spanish Fork, Utah) Richard

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he threw the white envelope on the desk. “I have something important I need to show you.” Five Years Earlier Chapter 2 ROSS ULBRICHT Ross, jump off a cliff.” Ross Ulbricht stood there with a slightly dumbfounded look on his face as he peered over the edge of the bluff. Below him, Austin’s

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pined for someone who would take care of her. Pamper her with affection and maybe spoil her with a few lavish dinners. Instead she met Ross Ulbricht. It was all one big accident. Julia had been aimlessly wandering around campus, thinking about her mother, when she found herself in one of the

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Building at Penn State. The lights inside the building flickered on as the fall sun set over campus. There, amid the normalcy of college life, Ross Ulbricht was pacing in one of the large lecture rooms, preparing for a school debate. The room where he stood was wide and deep, with rows

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Ross had been waiting for to build his experimental world with no rules. So in the summer of 2010, while Julia was photographing naked women, Ross Ulbricht, the failed physicist who wanted so badly to make a difference in the world, sat down at his beloved laptop to realize the idea that

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the PHP—the programming language—that Ross had tangled into a jumbled mess. But all of that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that Ross Ulbricht was ready to launch his new venture: the Silk Road. There was, however, still one major question that gnawed at him. Would anyone use the

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a new message from Erica posted on his Facebook wall, publicly, for all to see. “I’m sure the authorities would like to know about Ross Ulbricht’s drug website,” she had written, like a giant neon billboard on the Internet. The earth could have swallowed Ross whole. He began crying. He

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. By becoming the Dread Pirate Roberts, he could wear a mask that made him into two different people. In the real world he would be Ross Ulbricht; online he would be the Dread Pirate Roberts. “Yes, cap’n!” As Ross, he could still talk about his ideals about legalizing drugs, libertarianism, and

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going to happen! There were only two people on earth who had seen those numbers; one was named Dread Pirate Roberts and the other was Ross Ulbricht. Even Variety Jones didn’t know all those details. DPR politely declined to share the numbers with Nob, citing the risk that such sensitive information

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matching sneakers), then laughed. So much time had passed since their romance had begun; their lives had taken drastically different routes, and yet here was Ross Ulbricht, looking virtually unaltered. “You’re wearing the exact same outfit I bought you at Penn State!” she snickered. Ross simply smiled. They hadn’t seen

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children giggled as they bounced through the playground, and unleashed dogs barked as they chased one another on the hilltop. And there, amid this happiness, Ross Ulbricht lay on the grass, inhaling his new city. Ross fell in love with the Bay Area from almost the moment his feet touched the ground

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the city would have to deal with. That in a matter of months he would find himself dealing with dirty cops and rogue employees, and Ross Ulbricht would have to decide if he wanted to have people tortured and killed in order to protect his growing enterprise. Chapter 34 CHRIS IN THE

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counseled each other on every aspect of those worlds. The Dread Pirate Roberts had even trusted Variety Jones enough to tell him personal things about Ross Ulbricht, explaining that he had once been a physics student in college and about having his heart broken by his old girlfriend from Texas. So when

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. This was when Ross created a very strict rule, perhaps the most important of all his new security enhancements. Anything that could be linked to Ross Ulbricht online (personal e-mails or social media) would never be done on the DPR side of the computer. On the flip side, anything that linked

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decisions with vast repercussions in the other—the man in the pink-and-green-checkered shirt had become incredibly adept at separating the life of Ross Ulbricht from that of the Dread Pirate Roberts. As Ross he would go on these walkabouts with his friends (or alone), and the biggest decisions he

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, Carl would instead sell information back to the Dread Pirate Roberts in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins. This information would help Ross Ulbricht stay ahead of law enforcement as they hunted for the leader of the Silk Road. Just as he had before, Carl was about to cross

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48 ROSS GOES UNDERGROUND It was time to go into hiding. But this time, rather than the Dread Pirate Roberts having to disappear, it was Ross Ulbricht’s turn. A lot of other terrible things had happened since the murder of Green. Someone was looking for DPR as retribution. The heat was

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,200 monthly rent. He anonymously e-mailed the lessor and, following step two on his checklist—“Create new identity (name, backstory)”—rather than calling himself Ross Ulbricht, he used a completely fictitious name, Joshua Terrey. Another name that he reasoned could never be traced back to him. But creating a new identity

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since been deleted but still existed in the forum’s database. The account, he discovered, belonged to a “RossUlbricht@gmail.com.” Another search showed that Ross Ulbricht was a white male from the suburbs of Texas in his late twenties. But there was something missing from the profile of this new suspect

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live here!” The agent asked again. “Andrew Ford?” This time holding up a photo of nine fake IDs, each of which had a picture of Ross Ulbricht on the front. “Is there an Andrew Ford who lives here?” “No!” the Asian man vehemently responded, quickly closing the door in his face. “Now

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purchased nine fake IDs at 2260 Fifteenth Street instead of the address that had been written on the envelope: 2260 Fifteenth Avenue. The address where Ross Ulbricht lived. Chapter 53 THE DECONFLICTION MEETING Every year around this time, Gary took the day off from work to celebrate the week in 1977 when

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these clues, he would be able to talk about “Altoid,” the moniker that Gary had determined through a few subpoenas belonged to a man named Ross Ulbricht. • • • Chris Tarbell had decided he wouldn’t travel down to the deconfliction meeting the Department of Justice was setting up. He knew he was being

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, most important, see that those children grew up differently from how she had? There was a dream in her mind where that good man was Ross Ulbricht, and it ended with them both living happily ever after. Sadly, that fairy tale had never materialized. After the Spanish woman who knew Jesus arrived

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woman asked. “Yes!” She read aloud, explaining that Customs and Border Protection had “seized counterfeit identity documents” and a Dylan Critten from DHS had visited Ross Ulbricht at his house on Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco. The file she read from noted that Ross’s roommates had said his name was Josh

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. You know?” Gary said. “And then, a minute after he had posted the question on Stack Overflow, he went in and changed his username from Ross Ulbricht to Frosty, and then—” “What did you say?” Tarbell interrupted, sitting up in his bed. Gary was caught off guard by the question but answered

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you can post programming questions—” “No, not that,” Tarbell said, his tone coming across as aggressive. “What did you say after that?” Gary explained that Ross Ulbricht had signed up for an account on Stack Overflow with his real e-mail as his username, but a minute after asking a question on

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sat contemplating what they had all just heard. Finally the speechlessness broke. “Well,” Serrin said. “That’s interesting.” As this settled in, Jared looked up “Ross Ulbricht” online, and came across his YouTube page, where, amid a dozen videos about libertarianism, was the title that Ross had given his YouTube account: “OhYeaRoss

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one was valued at a few hundred million. That guy had read the works of influential libertarians like Rothbard, Mises, and Block; and yet now Ross Ulbricht was a ghostwriter for the most influential libertarian of them all: the Dread Pirate Roberts. Or maybe it was Ross alone penning those words. In

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, he saw that the handoff had, thankfully, gone unnoticed. The undercover account had proved more useful than Jared could ever have imagined to ensure that Ross Ulbricht really was DPR. It was one thing to have a suspect; it was something entirely different to gather enough evidence to convict him. Shortly after

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be responsible for the arrest, as this was in their jurisdiction (this was standard FBI procedure) and that the local agents wanted to go into Ross Ulbricht’s house with a SWAT team. “Oh, fuck.” “Yeah.” Tarbell had made this mistake before during his LulzSec bust, and he knew that they could

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arrest Ross Ulbricht ten thousand times over, but unless they caught him with his hands on his laptop, they might not be able to prove that they had

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Monterey Boulevard were mostly two- and three-story wood frames. They were painted all different colors, some white, others blue or green. The apartment where Ross Ulbricht now lived was in a three-story beige building in the middle of the block. Every once in a while a large Suburban SUV with

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saying. “Which friend?” Jared asked, thinking this could be another Tarbell joke. “Our. Friend,” Tarbell said firmly, “Is. Coming.” He couldn’t exactly blurt out “Ross Ulbricht” or “Dread Pirate Roberts” or “the criminal mastermind you’ve been after for two fucking years.” And then it hit Jared. Holy shit! Our friend

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. Jared was not far behind him. Tarbell turned in the only direction left and started walking south along Diamond Street, right into the path of Ross Ulbricht. Tarbell knew that the undercover FBI agents would be following Ross, but he wanted to get a glimpse of him firsthand. Cars and people flowed

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to all three administrative areas of the Silk Road, including the “Mastermind” page, an area of the site that only the Dread Pirate Roberts and Ross Ulbricht could log in to. As Tarbell and Jared entered the second floor of the library, Brophy appeared, holding by the arm a young man who

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them. Ross’s defense showed e-mails between Jared and other agents who had all believed, at one time or another, long before they captured Ross Ulbricht, that DPR was someone else. Dratel then argued that Ross had been framed by the real DPR. The back of the courtroom overflowed daily during

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room were jammed with reporters and bloggers covering the spectacle. The ones to the left had a different, more somber feeling and were allocated to Ross Ulbricht’s loved ones and supporters. Advocates came in from all over the country to champion Ross, protesting on the steps of the courthouse that he

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, the Dread Pirate Roberts, had been arrested. Well, you could knock me over with a feather! Jones thought at the time, seeing a picture of Ross Ulbricht on his television. Like everyone associated with the site, VJ followed Ross’s trial religiously, getting to know more about the former Boy Scout and

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abrupt line pointing upward and off to the right. Often when news articles are written about studies related to online drug-buying, the stories mention Ross Ulbricht as the pioneer at the forefront of this new world. The links from the stories will eventually lead readers to an obscure video online that

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that Ross is talking about someone else. “Do you think you’re going to live forever?” René asks. There’s a brief contemplative pause, then Ross Ulbricht looks at the camera and answers, “I think it’s a possibility. I honestly do. I think I might live forever in some form.” Chapter

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online drug bazaar was in shambles. Their leader was gone, and the employees wanted revenge. Their target had become the name on the bottom of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest report: “Christopher Tarbell. Special Agent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.” When Tarbell looked at the link Jared sent, detailing what the lieutenants of

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that had been discovered in the package. “How many are in there?” Jared asked. “I counted two hundred,” the agent replied. “Two hundred?!” “Two hundred.” Ross Ulbricht. IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP Young Ross in elementary school in Austin, Texas (top left). IMAGE FROM ULBRICHT’S FACEBOOK PAGE Ross the Eagle

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swimming pool. IMAGE COURTESY OF DEBORAH HORWITZ The NOMMO Club at Penn State University, where Ross practiced his djembe drumming. IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA VIE Ross Ulbricht and Julia Vie about to go on a date. IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA VIE The Silk Road Web site, which offered more than 6,625

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ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP Chris Tarbell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE TARBELL FAMILY A section of the detailed diary found on Ross Ulbricht’s computer in which he describes commissioning a “hit” on someone who was trying to blackmail the Dread Pirate Roberts. IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S

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of people throughout the day. If there is anyone who left more of those digital fingerprints lying around the Internet than most people, it was Ross Ulbricht. He spent years living on his computer and interacting with people, good and bad, through that machine. Over the course of my research for this

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the Dread Pirate Roberts talked to his lieutenants on the Silk Road about taking a weekend off for a short trip, on that same weekend Ross Ulbricht and his friends posted pictures of him camping. When Ross booked flights to Dominica, the Dread Pirate Roberts was unavailable at the exact moment the

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. http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archives/article_1cb3e5e4-6ed2-5bb8-b980-1df989c663f9.html. Lamoustache. “Silk Road Tales and Archives.” Antilop.cc. Mac, Ryan. “Living with Ross Ulbricht.” Tech, Forbes, October 9, 2013. Mullin, Joe. “Judge in Silk Road Case Gets Threatened on Darknet.” Law & Disorder, Ars Technica, October 22, 2014. Smiley, Lauren

Silk Road

by Eileen Ormsby · 1 Nov 2014 · 269pp · 79,285 words

and Co. Nice Guys Finish First A Changed DPR? Exit Atlantis PART THREE – The Fall A Series of Unfortunate Events Sting or Scam? Shutdown Meet Ross Ulbricht Aftermath Silk Road 2.0 The Sinking Ship Satoshi Unmasked? The Hydra Sources Acknowledgements About Eileen Orsmby Copyright page To Matt. Because you have always

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, Canada and the UK had nine different names but all had a photograph that matched the man who answered the door, who identified himself as Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht denied knowing anything about the documents. After all, he told the agents, hypothetically anyone could go on to a website named ‘Silk Road’ on

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site using computer language Curl, suggesting someone who was programming a hidden site. A minute after posting the question the user changed their name from ‘Ross Ulbricht’ to ‘frosty’. And they’d had undercover agents on the inside for over a year. Ulbricht, who had an advanced degree in chemical engineering and

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Roberts, a supposed criminal mastermind, was apparently caught in a public place logged into every incriminating site he had access to. This was the same Ross Ulbricht who had been visited by Homeland Security in July 2013 in relation to the package containing multiple counterfeit identification documents all bearing his photo. This

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– had absconded with thousands of dollars worth of members’ bitcoin. This time, it seemed DPR had paid around $650,000 to a slick-talking shyster. Ross Ulbricht was facing charges of conspiracy to commit six murders that apparently had never taken place, and Dread Pirate Roberts may have paid all the money

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simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force. – Ross Ulbricht’s LinkedIn profile An administrator of the Silk Road website, Curtis Green, a/k/a ‘Flush’, and ‘chronicpain’, age 47, of Utah, pleaded guilty today

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possess with attempt to distribute cocaine. … According to his plea agreement, beginning in November 2012, Green worked for the creator and operator of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, whom Green only knew by his alias, ‘Dread Pirate Roberts.’ Silk Road was an online, international marketplace that allowed users to anonymously buy and sell

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offline. Previously sealed official documents from law enforcement were released to the media. Over the ensuing weeks and months, a more complete picture of how Ross Ulbricht had been arrested emerged as more official documents were made public. It appeared that parallel investigations were being carried out by several agencies, including the

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sever the direct link drawn by the FBI between the Dread Pirate Roberts who had written ‘I started a thread on the Bitcoin forum’ and Ross Ulbricht. Previously, the only visible thread started on the Bitcointalk forum was by altoid, with whom Ulbricht was connected. The reinstated posts pointed to DPR talking

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be his downfall. I am really interested to see what happens next! Interests: trading, economics, physics, virtual worlds, liberty. – Ross Ulbricht’s LinkedIn profile Meet Ross Ulbricht At his bail hearing in November 2013, Ross Ulbricht’s lawyers submitted a total of sixty-three letters from family, friends and others attesting to his character and integrity

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boy with someone else’s itchy trigger finger. Nothing more. Stop defending him, it’s pathetic.’ Ulbricht pleaded not guilty to all charges. ‘Who is Ross Ulbricht? (Really): Eagle Scout, academic honors student, scholarship recipient, beloved son, grandson and brother, friend of many,’ said the Twitter feed set up by his family

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publications worked hard to unearth details of Ulbricht, most notably Rolling Stone, which published a lengthy piece by David Kushner. According to the various articles, Ross Ulbricht – a handsome Robert Pattinson lookalike – told anyone who asked that he was a foreign currency trader and described himself on his LinkedIn profile as an

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never returned. The picture emerging of the man once hailed as a hero, a visionary and a revolutionary was very unflattering indeed. But was it Ross Ulbricht? Aftermath The seizure of Silk Road and the arrest of the man the FBI claimed was the Dread Pirate Roberts were a boon for Silk

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Brisbane, respectively. Davis and Nash faced deportation to the US on conspiracy charges, which carry a maximum life imprisonment term. Silk Road members speculated that Ross Ulbricht had provided their names to the authorities in an effort to cooperate, and DPR 2.0 called Ulbricht a ‘coward’ in a media interview. But

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some form of integrity. They’re being run as get rich quick schemes. – Oracle, posting to Silk Road 2, 28 June 2014 The Hydra As Ross Ulbricht sat in prison awaiting his November 2014 trial, unable to access the $100 million worth of bitcoin stored on his computer, his mother tirelessly rallied

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state of Silk Road and the darknet marketplaces’, 30 April 2014. Dratel, Joshua L., law offices of, PC letter of support for bail application for Ross Ulbricht, 19 November 2013. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment. ‘Bitcoin virtual currency: Unique features present distinct challenges for deterring illicit activity’, 24 April

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. Krebs, Brian, ‘The world has no room for cowards’, Krebs on Security, 13 March 2013. Kushner, David, ‘Dead end on Silk Road: Internet crime kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s big fall’, Rolling Stone, 4 March 2014. McClintock, Alex, ‘Silk Road and the fast-changing world of online drug shopping’, The Monthly, June 2013

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg · 15 Nov 2022 · 494pp · 121,217 words

-half-year hunt, identified the site’s founder as a twenty-nine-year-old Texan with no criminal record, a man by the name of Ross Ulbricht. Agents had swarmed into the science fiction section of a San Francisco library, arrested Ulbricht where he sat running his vast drug empire, grabbed his

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case still reverberated through the law enforcement community. Gambaryan, based in the IRS’s Oakland office—just a few miles away, it turned out, from Ross Ulbricht’s home—had been asked only to interview a few witnesses in the aftermath of Ulbricht’s arrest. The IRS agent had itched to be

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IRS agent Gary Alford, an unsung hero of the Silk Road investigation. Alford’s role in that case, as the agent who had first identified Ross Ulbricht as the suspected creator of the world’s largest dark web drug market, was largely untold outside law enforcement circles at the time. From 2011

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one could trace DPR’s connection to an IP address, the internet protocol identifier that might reveal his location. When agents finally swooped in on Ross Ulbricht and handcuffed him in that San Francisco public library in October 2013, it was the FBI who received most of the public credit. But in

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of the site suggested “passing the torch” in the form of a hefty buyout. (All of this, I’d later learn—in part from reading Ross Ulbricht’s own secret journal—seems to have been part of the “Dread Pirate Roberts” myth that Ulbricht was spinning to cover his tracks should he

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weeks after I asked Meiklejohn to trace my pot purchases, on October 1, 2013, a handsome, tousle-haired, and wiry twenty-nine-year-old named Ross Ulbricht walked down Diamond Street in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. He entered a small café called Bello Coffee and Tea, carrying his Samsung

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character strings seemed meaningless to Gambaryan. But almost immediately, he could see he was onto something. On September 27, 2013, just a few days before Ross Ulbricht’s arrest, Gambaryan saw with a jolt of recognition that one of Force’s CampBX addresses had received a 525-bitcoin payment—the magic number

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on the role of a rogue agent but had come to inhabit it with almost ludicrous abandon. Gambaryan had once observed a curious entry in Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road log from September 13, 2013. It noted that Ulbricht had offered $100,000 not to Nob but to another supposed informant with

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behind the judge’s bench. A few minutes later, a slim, square-jawed thirty-year-old entered that courtroom, accompanied by his team of lawyers. Ross Ulbricht, wearing a gray suit, looked over the crowded gallery and flashed a smile to his mother. His trial was about to begin. In the defense

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’s opening statement, Ulbricht’s lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, began with a shocking admission: Yes, Ross Ulbricht had created the Silk Road. But then Dratel, a renowned national security lawyer, launched into the rest of the defense’s version of events: The

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, read Dratel’s words in news reports from the trial, and had a far more visceral reaction: He got angry. This was going to be Ross Ulbricht’s argument? Weaver was so “offended by the gross stupidity of the defense,” as he’d later put it, that he took an unusual step

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remains today—burned into Bitcoin’s permanent ledger. Five days later, the jury returned from just a few hours’ deliberation and read out their verdict: Ross Ulbricht was guilty on all counts. Ulbricht likely never had a chance of acquittal: The evidence stacked against him—long before his bitcoins were traced—had

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criminal side of the cryptocurrency economy, they had bounced back in fits and starts since the takedown of the Silk Road. Just a month after Ross Ulbricht’s arrest, a “Silk Road 2” had popped up, a clone of the original site complete with a reborn Dread Pirate Roberts to administer it

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, the FBI and Europol had launched a major takedown known as Operation Onymous, exploiting a rare security vulnerability in Tor—and likely intelligence gleaned from Ross Ulbricht’s laptop about Silk Road moderators who had joined Silk Road 2—to arrest several of Silk Road 2’s staff and rip half a

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had risen to prominence, this one called Evolution. It sold not only drugs but the sort of hacked data and stolen credit card numbers that Ross Ulbricht had deemed too unethical to allow on his site. When Evolution’s administrators disappeared in March 2015, absconding with the millions of dollars held in

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to seventy-one months. Both men had pleaded guilty. The full story of Force and Bridges had come to light just a few months after Ross Ulbricht’s guilty verdict, and his defense team had argued that Force and Bridges’s corruption meant Ulbricht deserved a retrial—that the agents’ foul play

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. On each page of AlphaBay, he’d signed his work: “proudly designed by Alpha02.” When Judge Katherine Forrest had imposed a double life sentence on Ross Ulbricht in May 2015, she had intended to scare off future dark web drug buyers, dealers, and administrators. By the time of AlphaBay’s rise, that

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username. But the evidence had been preserved by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit project that crawls and copies web pages for posterity. Just as with Ross Ulbricht, Alexandre Cazes’s operational security slipups had been permanently etched into the internet’s long memory. * * * · · · Within days, Rabenn and Miller believed their Alpha02 lead

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he is going to go to jail, and we’re going to get him in Florence supermax,” she remembers telling Miller, referencing the prison where Ross Ulbricht was then serving his life sentence. “I want this kid gone.” But when it came to digital drug busts, Sanchez had far more enthusiasm than

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a note explaining that he was merely an early investor in Bitcoin (the same vague story told by every crypto criminal from Carl Force to Ross Ulbricht). In some cases, the AlphaBay founder claimed to have bought thousands of coins from Mt. Gox in 2011 or 2012, knowing that it would be

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of his larger-than-life success, to stretch out his ego, and to soak up adulation, much as the Dread Pirate Roberts had been for Ross Ulbricht. But whereas DPR had built his following around a radical ethos of libertarianism and personal freedom, Rawmeo seemed to adhere to a much less idealistic

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the admin’s laptop. Now, when they came for that laptop’s secrets, they knew exactly what to expect. Just as the FBI had snatched Ross Ulbricht’s laptop from across the table where he was working in a public space, they understood they’d need to seize Cazes’s computer while

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dead silence and sweaty, anxious tension, far more than eagerness or anticipation. For his own part, he knew that the possibility of achieving an actual Ross Ulbricht–style arrest and seizing Cazes’s laptop in a live, logged-in state—not to mention his phone—was a long shot at best. Even

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in front of the video screens pumping her fist in the air. Rabenn and Hemesath gleefully hugged each other. Four years after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, it seemed they had pulled off a Glen Park Public Library of their own. * * * · · · But there was still the question of the phone. As Pong

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. They found that he was logged in to AlphaBay as its administrator. On the computer’s desktop, they found a text file where, just like Ross Ulbricht, he had tracked his net worth. Cazes had counted more than $12.5 million in assets, including houses and cars; $3.3 million in cash

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if he eventually cooperated. But it was Cazes’s glib tone that gave them pause. They wondered if he was in fact comparing himself to Ross Ulbricht, who had been convicted under that same charge. Did he see the “kingpin” label as a status symbol, one that would cement his place in

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encrypted and inaccessible? Was the hard drive of whatever computer Son used to administer the site set to encrypt itself, too, like the laptops of Ross Ulbricht and Alexandre Cazes? Unlike Cazes, with his tell-all Roosh V posts, Son hadn’t leaked information about his computers’ configuration anywhere they could find

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of Mt. Gox, the work of a hacker thief? Could this pile of coins actually be an enormous cache of Silk Road profits stolen from Ross Ulbricht? Gambaryan and an IRS-CI colleague named Jeremy Haynie began examining that mysterious treasure trove. They found that weeks after Ulbricht was arrested and in

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with that pseudonymous Bitcoin mogul and confirmed that they had, in fact, hacked the Silk Road and stolen the 69,370 bitcoins from the site. Ross Ulbricht, they wrote in an affidavit, had even gone so far as to threaten the hacker in 2013, trying to coerce them to return the money

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of a story. Situating that tale and others in this book in their historical context required partially retelling the story of the Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht. For some details of that story, I relied on the excellent reporting of Joshuah Bearman in his two-part Wired magazine feature on the Silk

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Road investigation, American Kingpin. Aside from interviewing the Dread Pirate Roberts for Forbes in 2013, much of my own Silk Road reporting came from attending Ross Ulbricht’s trial, and my stories from that trial are linked on a page of Wired.com titled “The Silk Road Trial: WIRED’s Gavel-to

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27, 2014, video recording downloaded from Princeton website, princeton.edu. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 10: GLEN PARK twenty-nine-year-old named Ross Ulbricht: Bilton, American Kingpin, 285. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Just at that moment, a disheveled couple: Ibid., 290. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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Pirate Roberts,” Wired, Jan. 13, 2015, wired.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After that seizure announcement: Nick Weaver, “How I Traced 20% of Ross Ulbricht’s Bitcoin to the Silk Road,” Forbes, Jan. 20, 2015, forbes.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Yum presented a bombshell revelation: Andy Greenberg

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, Feb. 2, 2015, wired.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Three months later, Ulbricht reappeared: Kari Paul, “Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht’s Life Sentence,” Vice Motherboard, Oct. 5, 2015, vice.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she sentenced Ulbricht to two life sentences: Andy Greenberg

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, “Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison,” Wired, May 29, 2015, wired.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT PART II: TRACER FOR HIRE Telling the story

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Silk Road Investigation,” Dec. 7, 2015, Justice Department, justice.gov. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A panel of judges: Andy Greenberg, “Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Loses His Life Sentence Appeal,” Wired, May 31, 2017, wired.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He apologized and added: Farivar and Mullin, “Stealing

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper · 18 May 2015 · 387pp · 112,868 words

on there, but they are selling other stuff.” The posting was made by someone who went by the screenname altoid. In real life, he was Ross Ulbricht, a 6-foot-2 surfer-cum-scientist who had been planning Silk Road for months when he put his innocent-sounding post on the forum

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the libertarian spectrum, less interested in reducing taxes and more interested in stopping government-sponsored wars—looking up to the same thinkers who had motivated Ross Ulbricht. At the same time, neither Roger nor Erik was the type of anarchist-leaning libertarian who fought against authority figures and societal expectations of all

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created the mess and could clean it up themselves. CHAPTER 11 November 2011 Success was also testing the big ambitions and grand ideas with which Ross Ulbricht had started Silk Road. After getting overwhelmed by new users in June 2011, he had brought the site back online, but on a more limited

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involved in this new market. CHAPTER 16 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

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wealth of information on Green’s computers, seeking clues to find their way to their real quarry, Dread Pirate Roberts himself. CHAPTER 17 January 2013 Ross Ulbricht was not the only Bitcoin entrepreneur who had gotten himself into something bigger than he could have ever imagined. In January Charlie Shrem’s BitInstant

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to virtual currency.” Neither of these requests suggested that lawmakers regarded this new technology with much warmth. NO ONE, THOUGH, was feeling more heat than Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts. Ross’s site was more successful than ever. In the middle of 2013, Silk Road was approaching its one-millionth registered

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recognized the young man from the photos on the forged IDs. He quickly presented his real driver’s license, from Texas, with his real name, Ross Ulbricht. He declined to answer any other questions about where the IDs had come from, but told the agents in an offhand way that anyone could

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. He quickly began the paperwork to get his board’s approval and free himself. CHAPTER 24 September 30, 2013 The spinning top that had been Ross Ulbricht’s life for much of the last three years was wobbling out of control in late September. He was trying to chase down the truth

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else in the world, it was now essentially free to trade Bitcoin. The real ascent in China began in mid-October, after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, when a division of Baidu, the search engine giant and the fifth-most-visited website in the world, announced it would be accepting Bitcoin payments

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, some developers began trying to devise a truly decentralized online market, which would not have to rely on the sort of centralized escrow service that Ross Ulbricht and his staff had provided and that had ultimately proved to be the site’s worst weakness. Meanwhile, on the Bitcoin forums and Reddit the

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courthouse, the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, the most powerful prosecutor in the country and the same man who had filed charges against Ross Ulbricht four months earlier, publicly announced that his office had unsealed criminal charges against Charlie and the Florida man known as BTC King, Robert Faiella. At

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Bitcoin Association at a Formula One racetrack on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Austin was a fitting place for the event because this was where Ross Ulbricht had grown up and founded Silk Road, the truest experiment in many of the early ideals. Ross was now in jail in Brooklyn, awaiting trial

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in the weeks since he had been in Argentina. The United States Marshals Service had auctioned off the 29,655 Bitcoins it had seized from Ross Ulbricht, and the winner was a major venture capitalist, Tim Draper, who was working with the startup that employed Nick Szabo. Once U.S. government officials

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/. The other is at http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road. Many of the details in the book came from the Silk Road’s forums and Ross Ulbricht’s trial, which will be referred to in the notes by the following abbreviations: SRF: Silk Road forum archives, http://antilop.cc/sr/download/stexo

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_sr_forum.zip. RUTT: Ross Ulbricht trial transcripts, United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. United States District Court Southern District of New York. 14 CR 68 (KBF). RUTE

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: Ross Ulbricht trial exhibits, United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. United States District Court Southern District of New York. 14 CR 68 (KBF). The notes

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GX 250 and GX 240B. 117he sold his pickup truck and moved to Sydney, Australia: David Kushner, “Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall,” Rolling Stone, February 4, 2014, http://www.rollingstone .com/culture/news/dead-end-on-silk-road-internet-crime-kingpin

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-ross-ulbrichts-big-fall-20140204. 117He would fit in his work around trips to Bondi beach: RUTE GX 240C. 118“the biggest and strongest willed character I

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Ormsby, Silk Road (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2014). 168His work on Silk Road was done at an Internet café around the corner: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 168Over the summer, a Silk Road user had managed to follow a series of transactions

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GX 291. 169“put yourself in the shoes of a prosecutor”: RUTE GX 225B. 170Ross decided to help nob sell his kilogram: Superseding indictment against Ross Ulbricht filed by the Grand Jury for the District of Maryland, October 1, 2013. 171Ross had always been somewhat skeptical: RUTE GX240B. 171“beat up, then

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forced to send the Bitcoins he stole back”: Superseding indictment against Ross Ulbricht filed by the Grand Jury for the District of Maryland, October 1, 2013. Ross has not yet been tried on the charges in the Maryland

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GX 250. 225Ross agreed to pay $100,000 up front: RUTE GX 241. 226“Don’t want to be a pain here”: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 226paid for with 3,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $500,000: Letter opposing

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bail, filed by Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, November 20, 2013. These alleged murders and the chats between Ross and redandwhite were discussed during Ross Ulbricht’s trial, but Ross was not charged with any counts of murder for hire and Canadian police never found any evidence of any suspicious deaths

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tied to Ross. 227He moved out of his friend’s apartment in June: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 227“encrypt and backup important files”: Letter opposing Ross Ulbricht’s release on bail, filed by Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, November 20, 2013. 228

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Pirate Roberts to Silk Road forum, September 20, 2013. 228Ross assigned Variety Jones: RUTE GX 241. 228When agents knocked on the door: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 229Ross changed apartments: Thomas Kiernan, RUTT, January 22, 2013. CHAPTER 23 238opened 350,000 free

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-Yeghiayan, RUTT, January 14, 2015. 248“I’m so sick of you,” the woman shouted: David Kushner, “Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall,” Rolling Stone, February 4, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/dead-end-on-silk-road-internet-crime-kingpin

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-ross-ulbrichts-big-fall-20140204. 248As Ross turned around to see what was: Thomas Kiernan, RUTT, January 22, 2013. 248did so by searching on Google through old:

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, 101–103, 187, 248–249, 283, 304–305, 314–315, 334 Google Wallet, 101 government regulation/investigation arrest of Roger Ver, 77–78 arrest of Ross Ulbricht, 170–171 BitInstant, 222–224 BTC China, 273–275 Erik Voorhees, 224–225 PGP and Zimmerman, 10 virtual currencies, 66–67, 196–198, 235 Graeber

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard · 23 Jul 2017 · 309pp · 54,839 words

knows you’re a dog. Of course, with every confirmed transaction logged in the blockchain forever, it’s pseudonymous at best; as the case of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road showed (see Chapter 4), law enforcement will happily do the tedious legwork of tracing your transactions if you motivate them sufficiently

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LinkedIn page107 details his career back to eDonkey, but chooses to omit Mt. Gox. Drugs and the Darknet: The Silk Road Both Anne Frank, and Ross Ulbricht created dark markets to help people hide from violent oppressors who were trying to hurt peaceful people. – Roger Ver108 Anonymous or pseudonymous cryptocurrency has one

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’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing. Ross Ulbricht grew up in Austin, Texas, born to a well-off family. He was an Eagle Scout; friends and acquaintances were widely impressed by what a

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2011 blog post makes it seem startlingly unlikely that Wright had heard of Bitcoin that early. Wright had also told Matthews he had met with Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road in Sydney. O’Hagan notes: “MacGregor later told me he was convinced because Wright had shown Matthews the draft Satoshi white

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) [106] Kim Nilsson. “The missing MtGox bitcoins”. WizSec, 19 April 2015. [107] “Jed McCaleb”. LinkedIn. [108] Comma in original. Roger Ver. “Both Anne Frank, and Ross Ulbricht created dark markets to help people hide from violent oppressors who were trying to hurt peaceful people.” Twitter, 16 July 2016. (archive) [109] Mike Power

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2015. [123] Poly Paradyme. “Interview with Lyn Ulbricht About Upcoming Silk Road Appeal”. Coinivore, 25 November 2015. (archive) [124] Andy Greenberg. “In Silk Road Appeal, Ross Ulbricht’s Defense Focuses on Corrupt Feds”. Wired, 12 January 2016. [125] United States of America v. Ulbricht, 15-1815-cr, Document 177, page 122, 31

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?

by Dominic Frisby · 1 Nov 2014 · 233pp · 66,446 words

amassed an $80 million fortune in 18 months. But he was in the Glen Park Library for the free wifi. The man they arrested was Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old from Austin, Texas. He is hardly the millionaire kingpin of the Hollywood variety. Rather, he’s a handsome nerd, a former

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trafficking, hacking and money laundering. Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty. A campaign has begun to help him raise the money to fight his case, Free Ross Ulbricht – freeross.org. Why Bitcoin will end the war on drugs The FBI congratulated themselves. Over a year’s work and they had got their man

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, scam, or get hacked – none of which are congruent with our aspirations or morals’.71 He’s right. The Silk Road was shut down and Ross Ulbricht was incarcerated. Sites like Atlantis, Project Black Flag and Sheep Marketplace all saw their administrators make off with their clients’ money. Silk Road 2.0

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Satoshi was working on Bitcoin, Keiser was making TV programmes. There isn’t time for both. Amazingly, there is even an argument that Satoshi was Ross Ulbricht. What are these people smoking? Would Satoshi risk everything he stands to gain by creating the de facto digital cash system on an illegal venture

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I failed.’ Business Insider. April 12, 2013. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://read.bi/1tHF8OE. Kushner, David. ‘Dead end on Silk Road: internet crime kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s big fall.’ Rolling Stone. February 4, 2014. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://rol.st/1tHFaGu. Laird, Nick. ‘ShareLynx charts.’ ShareLynx Gold Charts. Accessed June

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.ly/1tHF8OJ. How a Computer Nerd became the FBI’s Most Wanted Drug Dealer 54 David Kushner, ‘Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall,’ Rolling Stone, February 4, 2014, accessed March 1, 2014, http://rol.st/1tHFaGu. 55 Patrick Howell O’Neill, ‘How big is the

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Road Mastermind Was a Dirty Hippie, Best Friend Says,’ Mashable, November 4, 2013, accessed March 1, 2014, http://on.mash.to/1tHF8y5. 57 Ibid. 58 Ross Ulbricht, ‘Thoughts on Freedom,’ July 6, 2010, accessed March 1, 2014, http://on.fb.me/1trBch6. 59 Adam Taylor, ‘Alleged Founder Of Silk Road Posted LinkedIn

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency

by Ian Demartino · 2 Feb 2016 · 296pp · 86,610 words

from person to person. Amir Taaki: Dark Wallet co-creator and lead developer of Darkmarket, later forked to Open Bazaar. Peter Todd: Bitcoin core developer. Ross Ulbricht: Was accused and convicted of being Dread Pirate Roberts; his case is under appeal. Roger Ver: Angel investor and Bitcoin evangelist; CEO of Memorydealers.com

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Dread Pirate Roberts and implicate him in a large number of crimes. The crime that got the most media attention and was used to deny Ross Ulbricht bail was the alleged ordering of three murders. According to the government’s accounts, Dread Pirate Roberts ordered three hits: one in retaliation for a

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his personal account. Further, Force allegedly sent an unauthorized Justice Department subpoena to an online payment service directing that it unfreeze his personal account. Essentially, Ross Ulbricht was denied bail and painted as a murderer in the media because the online persona Dread Pirate Roberts allegedly hired a fictional hitman to kill

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court but nonetheless affected the opinion of both the supposedly impartial judge and the public. On the day that he was apprehended in October 2013, Ross Ulbricht was sitting in the San Francisco library with his laptop open. Authorities had figured out that if he were allowed to close it, it would

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Roberts and how much he was specifically paid. Is it possible that the real Dread Pirate Roberts, perhaps working in conjunction with Force, set up Ross Ulbricht by luring him back to the Silk Road and planting information on his computer? A detailed log of Ulbricht’s alleged criminal activities was found

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has done little to slow the growth of online piracy. Other Tor Services and How to Use Them The shutdown of the Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence didn’t deter people from using Tor and Bitcoin to continue criminal activity. Sites with similar layouts and the same rules still

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.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa-idUSBREA2U0TY20140331. 7 Deep Web. Directed by Alex Winter. Performed by Cindy Cohn, Andy Greenberg. Epix, 2015. VoD. 8 “Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to Life in Prison.” FBI. May 29, 2015. Accessed June 22, 2015. https://www.fbi.gov

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/newyork/press-releases/2015/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-life-in-prison. 9 Kelion, Leo. “NSA and GCHQ Agents ‘leak Tor Bugs’, Alleges Developer

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the alleged former owner of the Sheep Marketplace, Thomas Jirˇikovský, had been arrested not on drug and organized crime charges as Silk Road administrator Ross Ulbricht was, but rather on money-laundering charges after buying a luxury home and putting the rest of the stolen bitcoins into his girlfriend’s bank

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, 10 Private Key, 4 ProTip, 266 Proof of stake, 220 Proof of work, 23, 31 Public Key, 4 Public-Key Encryption, 11 R Remittance, 247 Ross Ulbricht, 103 S Silk Road, The, 95 Shaun Bridges, 106 Stuart Fraser, 157 Solo Mining, 189 T-Z Trading Indicators: Fibonacci Retracements, 214 Moving Average, 213

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words

secure or as impervious to government penetration as their proponents claimed. Perhaps no story better exemplifies the flaws in impenetrable crypto security than that of Ross Ulbricht, otherwise known as Dread Pirate Roberts, the architect of Silk Road. After its founding in 2012, Silk Road grew rapidly and appeared to be a

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October 2013, four months after Edward Snowden came out of hiding and endorsed Tor, a twenty-nine-year-old native Texan by the name of Ross Ulbricht was arrested in a public library in San Francisco. He was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts and was charged with multiple counts of money

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attackers to behave “ethically” in order for it to remain secure. It must have come as an even greater shock to the cypherpunk believers like Ross Ulbricht, who trusted Tor to run his highly illegal Internet business and who is now in jail for the rest of his life. Tor’s spat

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.wordpress.com/2008/06/crypto_anarchist.pdf. 58. Dread Pirate Roberts, message on the Silk Road Forum, March 20, 2012 (United States of America v. Ross Ulbricht, Exhibit 4, filed April 16, 2015). 59. Aaron Sankin, “Searching for a Hitman in the Deep Web,” Daily Dot, October 10, 2013, https://www.dailydot

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Ordering 5 Assassinations,” Wired, February 2, 2015; “Ulbricht Log,” Document 121–1, SA-38 through SA-42. After a user told Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Ross Ulbricht) he had hacked Silk Road and obtained contact details for every user of the site, and threatened to leak the information unless he was paid

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data

by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen and Robert Vamosi · 14 Feb 2017 · 305pp · 93,091 words

by the Internet name of Dread Pirate Roberts, a name taken from the movie The Princess Bride. Roberts, also known as DPR, was in fact Ross Ulbricht—not only the admin but also the owner of Silk Road, an online drug emporium, and as such was the subject of a federal manhunt

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a 900 MHz radio to connect to an antenna dongle on a computer as far as 2.5 miles away. So in the case of Ross Ulbricht, the FBI could have been amassing outside the Glen Park library while he was in someone’s basement doing laundry several blocks away. The need

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your IP address. One of the first steps is to set up a couple of anonymous e-mail accounts using Tor. This was something that Ross Ulbricht neglected to do. As we saw in the previous chapter, he used his personal e-mail account more than once while conducting his Silk Road

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business on the Dark Web. These unintentional crossovers from Dread Pirate Roberts to Ross Ulbricht and back again helped investigators confirm that the two names were associated with one person. To prevent abuse, most e-mail providers—such as Gmail

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the previous chapter I talked about some spectacular failures at being invisible. These were glorious but short-term attempts at invisibility. In the case of Ross Ulbricht, he didn’t really plan his alter ego very carefully, occasionally using his real e-mail address instead of an anonymous one, particularly in the

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-malware/. 23. https://bitlaunder.com/launder-bitcoin. Chapter Fifteen: The FBI Always Gets Its Man 1. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-creator-ross-ulbricht-sentenced-life-prison/. 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax-agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

by Ben Mezrich · 20 May 2019 · 304pp · 91,566 words

Road was hanging around their neck every day like a drug-addled albatross. And now suddenly, just like that, it was gone: cooked, just like Ross Ulbricht, the twenty-nine-year-old who had been IDed as the mogul behind the biggest illegal drug bazaar in history. “Dread Pirate Roberts is going

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Bitcoin. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the price had skyrocketed since Silk Road had gone down, actually reaching $1,000 a coin within one month of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest. The tenfold rise was incredible to fathom: the Winklevoss twins alone were now sitting on $200 million in Bitcoin. And though BitInstant might

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before Charlie had agreed to settle, and Turner’s various assistants. Fitting, since Turner had also led the prosecution against Silk Road that had sent Ross Ulbricht to prison for life. Next to them, Preet Bharara himself, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, the famous prosecutor who had taken down

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for the Second Circuit upheld his conviction and sentence in May 2017, and the Supreme Court declined to consider any further appeal in June 2018, Ross Ulbricht, now thirty-four, is currently serving a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole for the crimes of money laundering and