What even was the Silk Road?

President Donald Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday, releasing him from a life sentence after 10+ years.

A pair of hands on a keyboard in a darkened room.

But if you don’t spend much time on the dark web — Who does? — you might not know who Ulbricht is, or what exactly he did to get a life sentence in the first place.

I thought the Silk Road was really old

Sure. The Silk Road was a network of Eurasian trade routes dating back to the second century BC, so named for the textiles that made up a share of its commerce.

Ulbricht, using the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” founded the modern Silk Road in 2011 as an online black market for buying and selling goods — mostly drugs, but other items included fake IDs and legal items, including books and art.

It could only be found on the dark web — another part of the internet that users access with Tor, a network that anonymizes users’ locations — and transactions required cryptocurrency.

The FBI shut down the Silk Road in 2013, and Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering in 2015.

That all sounds pretty illegal…

… so why the pardon?

Ulbricht has been embraced by many libertarians, who regard the Silk Road as having been a marketplace for free trade, and crypto enthusiasts.

Ulbricht, they argued, did not trade drugs or do any harm.

  • The Silk Road did not allow certain harmful items, including child pornography.
  • But six people did fatally overdose on drugs linked to the platform, and there’s some murkiness around whether Ulbricht was involved in an alleged murder-for-hire plot.

Yet even among those who don’t embrace the Silk Road as a libertarian experiment, there have been concerns over his sentence of two life terms, plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole. Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence at the Libertarian National Convention last year.

What’s up with the Silk Road now?

It’s gone, but several dark web sites have popped up to replace it. Users can still access the dark web, where they’ll find both illegal and legal activities. For example, activist groups may use the dark web to communicate in areas where the government censors online activity.

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Topics: Internet

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