The Rise And Fall Of The Silk Road - Pt 1 The Rise

The rise and fall of the secret underground drugs market, the Silk Road is the stuff of cinema. As well as the stuff we already knew about, like the illegal drugs and the Dread Pirate Roberts alias, what was unveiled last week when, Ross William Ulbricht, a physicist from San Fran was named as the mastermind behind it all, included unhappy drug lords, multiple forged documents and even hit men.

The Silk Road of the 21st century didn't run from Europe to Asia and it wasn't used as a means of transporting silk back and forth between the two continents. No, the modern day 'Silk Road' rested in the deep web hosted on anonymous servers, through virtual tunnels and encrypted browsers, beneath layers and layers of the internet’s surface. It was only accessible through TOR, a program that directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of more than three thousand relays concealing the user's location.

To put it simply, it was the internet's black market and it's number one seller was drugs.

At any given time approximately 220 distinct categories of items were displayed on the site, ranging from books and digital goods to prescription drugs and LSD. The four most popular categories were linked to drugs; nine of the top ten, and 16 of the top 20 were drug-related.

The Silk road was made possible not only by the anonymity TOR provided but also through its use of the online currency BitCoin. During an interview with Forbes only a few short months ago, Dread Pirate Roberts, the online alias of Ulbricht, stated that he felt  "We've won the State's War on Drugs because of Bitcoin." It allows users to transfer funds via the TOR network thus once again ensuring anonymity.

The levels of privacy protection ran deep, but it seemed to be Ulbricht's brash attitude that might have gotten him caught in the end.

In Part 2 we'll explain how Ulbricht, one of the most wanted men in the world, and a man so wrapped up in the privacy of his online network, managed to be so dumb in his use of the internet.