Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby Read Free Book Online Page B

which by now had become a thriving meeting space for customers and vendors of the site to discuss all things drugs:
    As many of you know, US Senators are aware of the site and aiming to take it down . . . The die have been cast and now we will see how they land. We will be diverting even more effort into countering their attacks and making the site as resilient as possible, which means we may not be as responsive to messages for a while.
    I’m sure this news will scare some off, but should we win the fight, a new era will be born. Even if we lose, the genie is out of the bottle and they are fighting a losing war already.
    ‘It’s better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb.’
    The senators were not very successful in the efforts they made to shut down Silk Road in 2011. But terminating drug operations was a popular vote-winner, so as long as Silk Road was on the radar, politicians would have a vested interest in seeing it closed. Soon after the senators’ letter, a multi-agency task force based in Baltimore commenced Operation Marco Polo. This operation would eventually encompass investigators from the FBI, DEA, Department of Homeland Security, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), US Postal Inspection, US Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
    But in the short term there was little that could be done about this new online black market. The combined technologies of Tor, bitcoin and easy-to-learn encryption were doing their job of hiding the tracks of users and administration alike. Within five days of the June 2011 Gawker article, bitcoin’s price had doubled from around $9 to more than $18 per coin. Two days after that, it hit $30 as registrations on Silk Road boomed and demand for bitcoin grew. Within days, the post-Gawker rush resulted in membership jumping from around 1000 to north of 10,000 accounts.
    Silk Road began to have stability issues as more and more people tried to log on to see what the fuss was about and, perhaps, to buy drugs. For a while, it seemed it was never accessible. ‘Does it even exist?’ demanded one Bitcointalk forum member. ‘I’ve never been able to find it. I think it might be some joke they are playing on the politicians . . . it just sounds too far-fetched to be possible.’
    Rumours started circulating that it had all been a hoax. The merely curious who had not been able to log on to have a look drifted away in the belief that it was just another media beat-up. Those who had been Silk Road members pre-Gawker were angry at Chen, blaming him for what they assumed would be the market’s inevitable demise. The article became the most discussed subject on the Silk Road message boards, which at the time were part of the main site.
    ‘Some people were really mad,’ said Stacey Long, a Melbourne-based early adopter. ‘They wanted Adrian Chen’s blood. Silk Road was supposed to be a secret.’
    With the article bringing a flood of new users to the site, Silk Road went into damage control and on 9 June 2011 it shut down for an upgrade to cope with the influx – but it gave the faithful fair warning so they would not panic:
    hey gang, here’s the scoop . . .
    The site went mainstream way faster than we were hoping and we weren’t prepared for the traffic. Everyone on the site knows what a pain it is getting 502 errors [an error received when the servers involved in loading a web page are unable to communicate] all the time. So, we are working on setting up an even more secure server that can handle all the traffic as well. Once we get that set up, and make some more improvements here and there, we’ll be opening back up, whether by invite, open registration, or whatever.
    For everyone pissed at us, we just want to offer our sincere apologies. We really didn’t expect all of the media to catch on so quickly, and we should have been prepared with a semi-closed system. We’ll do our best to get out of the spotlight and hopefully the