Ross Ulbricht is the founder of the deep web marketplace called Silk Road. If you surf through crypto X, you may notice that some count the days until Trump’s inauguration, believing that on day one, he will get Ulbricht out of prison. Let’s figure out why crypto enthusiasts are so enthusiastic about Ulbricht’s clemency.
Silk Road has at least two faces. For some, it was a forum where free-minded people, interested in economy, individual sovereignty, libertarian ideas, and other things could share their thoughts, discuss things, and so on. Others remember that the website facilitated the online trade of all sorts of drugs, and its revenue during the 2.5-year tenure reached from $200 million to over $1 billion.
People who think that the evils of drugs can be fought via the drugs ban find Silk Road an ugly website that was run by criminals for criminals. Those who don’t support the war on drugs and rather lean to the harm reduction side of the spectrum find the marketplace’s activity even healthier than more traditional street-based drug trafficking. However, the website was not all about drugs.
The ideas behind Silk Road
Silk Road had multiple moderators, so it is not clear if they all shared the same ideology and goals. In their posts, they confronted violence and coercion and promoted individual freedom over tyranny. One of the messages had a portion that read, “what we’re doing isn’t about scoring drugs or ‘sticking it to the man.’ It’s about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we have done no wrong. Silk Road is a vehicle for that message.”
According to a mythical prime operator of the marketplace, the Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road had several restricted types of goods and services. It included hitmen services, child pornography, counterfeit coupons and money, and stolen possessions. The goods and services sold on the Silk Road should not have been intended to harm the market users.
One may wonder how Silk Road ended up facilitating drug sales if it didn’t allow harmful goods? Well, that’s complicated. The 2014 study shows that a substantial amount of deals on Silk Road were dealer-level, and the volumes were high enough to reduce the drug violence on the street. Instead of fighting each other, drug dealers began to adopt marketing stunts and try to get better products for sale as Internet-based drug trafficking dictated new rules. Now, the customers could post negative or positive feedback, impacting the dealer’s reputation on the market, and that mattered more than the guns.
Additionally, the forum was full of instructions on how to get high safely – or, better say, how to reduce risks and harm, how to avoid overdose, and so on. People who dream about the total elimination of drugs are hardly impressed with this approach. However, the harm reduction supporters rather stand for a more conscious drug consumption promoted on Silk Road.
We don’t know how much of the described above adheres to Ross Ulbricht. He is certainly an avid libertarian, and he already had these ideas in the days when he conceived Silk Road. About that time, he wrote in the LinkedIn post:
“I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind… I am creating an economic 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.”
Ulbricht is seen by many as a non-violent idealist rather than a mercantile criminal. None other than Tim Draper said that America needs this guy to work in the economy. However, it’s clear that the deep web-based unlicensed market distributing drugs was illegal and couldn’t be tolerated by the authorities. But why exactly is Ross Ulbricht in prison?
Why is he in prison?
Ross Ulbricht was arrested in 2013. In the 2015 trial, he pleaded guilty to creating the marketplace. However, he insists that after creating the marketplace, he let others manage it. Now, he is serving a whopping two life sentences plus 40 years in prison without parole (a $180+ million fine aside) for a series of convictions.
The list includes engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, distributing narcotics (including by means of the Internet), conspiring to distribute narcotics, conspiring to commit money laundering, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit computer hacking. People advocating for Ulbricht’s clemency always stress that he is a first-time offender who committed no violent crime and had no victims. The two life sentences plus 40 years seem to be too much for operating an “eBay for drugs.”
Before the trial, Ulbricht was charged with murder-for-hire attempts, but these charges were dropped. Someone in Silk Road was discussing the killing of other members in order to avoid data leakage, but no hit actually occurred, and no evidence that this “someone” is Ulbricht was presented.
It’s worth saying that Ulbricht is not the only Silk Road team member serving a severe sentence. Roger Thomas Clark, the Second-in-Command on Silk Road, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2023. According to the press release introducing Clark’s sentence, following Clark’s advice, Ulbricht resorted to hiring a hitman and paid a hitman $80,000.
Is Ross innocent?
The answer is negative and cannot be positive in any respect. Ulbricht pleaded guilty and expressed regret in the letter to the federal judge. He called his brainchild a “costly and naive idea that has ruined his life.”
While some remember Silk Road as a place where they could find cheap medications for their ill relatives, others share stories that reveal that Ulbricht’s life was not the only one that Silk Road helped to ruin. Drugs do it easily, and for many, Silk Road was a handy way to get some. Ulbricht may have dreamed of empowering freedom, but for some, he facilitated a fall for addiction.
However, it is easy to mix up what we blame on Silk Road with what we blame on Ulbricht. The latter claims he distanced himself from Silk Road early. Allegedly, the Dread Pirate Roberts was the moniker used by several moderators, however, Ulbricht was found responsible for the DRP actions as if he had been the only person behind the handle.
Although Ulbricht denied being the only person using this handle and named none other than the Mt. Gox founder Mark Karpelès as the person in question, Judge Katherine B. Forrest declined to discuss the possible involvement of other people in ‘being DRP’, denied the cross-examination, and chose to follow the prosecution narrative effectively barring the way for Ulbricht’s defense.
In the documentary Deep Web, directed by Alex Winter, a senior writer for Wired, Andy Greenberg, who interviewed DRP remotely before the trial, says that a person he was talking to claimed that this moniker was handed to him by the marketplace creator, then unknown. The very name Dread Pirate Roberts refers to a character from the book Princess Bride and the eponymous movie. This Pirate could be multiple persons doing his deeds and using his image.
Interestingly enough, while Ulbricht was in jail, awaiting a trial, Silk Road went live again, and the operator’s name was DRP again. Who knows if it was the same person, but generally,y it seems that Ulbricht may actually not be a man responsible for the marketplace’s activity.
More than that, the FBI didn’t provide a trustworthy explanation of how they located the Silk Road servers, which was the first huge step in shutting the operation down. Many believe those federals could have illegally hacked the foreign servers without a warrant, violating the Fourth Amendment. However, Ulbricht didn’t succeed in pushing this narrative in the court.
An eye-popping sentence for non-violent crimes committed by the first-time offender is sometimes attributed to a smear campaign in which Ulbricht was presented by the press as a drug kingpin who tried to kill his partners. The murder-for-hire charges were dropped soon, but the stain on Ulbricht’s image proved to be resistant. The jury, who wasn’t that tech-savvy to understand things like the deep web and bitcoins, was probably affected by the image imposed on Ulbricht in the press.
According to Alex Winter, Ulbricht is a model prisoner who teaches his peers math and yoga, helping them get off drugs. He describes him as humane, highly educated, and self-aware. The Deep Web director believes that the time served by Ulbricht is more than enough for his wrongs.
Many politicians, public speakers, and institutions voiced their support for Ulbricht, noting that America needs such people out of jail. So, if Trump told the truth, Ulbricht may soon have a chance to prove his talents, this time in a less harmful way.
Answering the question of why people in the crypto community count days until the release of Ross Ulbricht from prison, we can cite two main reasons. Firstly, his libertarian views resonate with the views of many in the crypto community. Secondly, the crypto community does care about justice and injustice, and 11 years served by Ross in prison is widely perceived as enough term for his crimes, especially given that the Land of the Free already has the biggest incarcerated population on the planet and the life sentence of Ulbricht may cost taxpayers around $2 million.
