Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby Read Free Book Online Page A

banned from Reddit for some time, until the more clear-thinking members of the community pointed out that censorship of this kind didn’t help anybody.
    But in May 2011, when he first heard of Silk Road, Chen was still a 25-year-old doing nights and weekends and trying to carve a niche for himself. He had noticed that the virtual currency bitcoin was increasingly being featured in articles on specialist technology blogs but had not yet reached the mainstream. Sensing a story, he found his way to the Bitcointalk forum.
    ‘I visited the forums and one thing that was always coming up was this Silk Road: there were these huge threads about whether it was good or bad for bitcoin. People were asking how to get on it, what is it?’ Chen’s first instinct was to assume it was a scam. ‘I couldn’t believe that’s what they were actually talking about – that it was a drug market.’
    It didn’t take him long to figure out how to download Tor, although it was the first time he had heard of it. ‘I installed it, went on to Silk Road and, you know, clicked around a little bit and saw that it looked like it was really real. But even then I was sceptical of it.’
    Sceptical or not, he thought it was worth investigating and started messaging people on the bitcoin forum who claimed they had used the black market successfully. He found that many of them were open to talking about it and were excited about its potential. This gave him the confidence to contact the owner of the site. Silkroad was enthusiastic and forthcoming about the new venture, providing Chen with quotes for the article and lessons in his philosophy of agorism. But he also had a favour to ask.
    ‘He said, “We want to get bigger, but can you hold off? We’re not ready for the attention yet”,’ said Chen. ‘And I just said, “No, I can’t, I’m writing about this now. Sorry.” And then I wrote about it.’ After two days of research and a few hours of writing over a couple of lattes in a New York cafe, he filed his story and went right on to the next one.
    On 1 June 2011, Gawker released an article called ‘The underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable’.
    At the time there were close to 400 listings of drugs on Silk Road, the website having steadily gained users by word of mouth. Chen described the site, its owner and the role of bitcoin and provided instructions for how to find Silk Road. He knew he had written a story about a niche internet subculture, but swears he didn’t think it would make many waves: ‘I thought it was interesting, but I didn’t think it was going to be so huge, like one of the biggest stories I’d ever written. And it still is, I think.’
    The story had an immediate impact on Silk Road, bitcoin, Gawker and those waging a war on drugs. Within three days, two US senators publicly called on US Attorney General Eric Holder and the DEA to shut down Silk Road.
    ‘This audacious website should be shut down immediately,’ Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said.
    Fellow Democrat senator Charles Schumer wholeheartedly agreed. ‘Literally, it allows buyers and users to sell illegal drugs online, including heroin, cocaine, and meth, and users do sell by hiding their identities through a program that makes them virtually untraceable. It’s a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It’s more brazen than anything else by light years,’ he said. ‘By cracking down on the website immediately, we can help stop these drugs from flooding our streets.’
    True to their word, the senators wrote to the Attorney General and the DEA urging them to investigate bitcoin’s relationship to online illicit substance purchases, co-signing the letter. ‘As part of this critical mission, we urge you to take immediate action and shut down the Silk Road network.’
    Silk Road’s owner responded with a posting on the Silk Road forums,