To be safe, every detail had to be checked. The “product,” those small, scrumptious mushrooms in the big black garbage bag, were ready to go. (Ross had tested them in the woods with a friend to make sure they were good, and they were beyond amazing.) The back-end database and front-end code sat on a hidden server that Ross had given the nickname Frosty. A green logo of a camel welcomed visitors to the Amazon of drugs. Sure, the site was missing some features, but Ross was a start-up of one—he’d fix those in due time.
And it was finally here. Opening day.
Ross almost hadn’t made it to this moment—several times! First there was an absolutely, utterly, nauseatingly terrifying incident that had occurred just before the site was set to open, when Ross, by sheer fate, had almost ended up jail. Austin had been in the middle of a heat wave a few weeks earlier, and somehow there had been a water leak in the apartment housing his secret magic mushroom farm. The landlord had gone into the space to inspect the flood and instead had found Ross’s drug laboratory. Irate, the landlord called Ross to tell him the next phone call was to the local police. Ross tore through the space, trying to get everything out before the cops arrived, and thankfully screeched away just in time. When he returned home that evening, smelling rank from the mushroom residue, he was so shaken up it took Julia hours to calm him. The thought of what would have happened had he been caught was enough to put Ross on the edge of a panic attack.
Still, that hadn’t deterred him from realizing his vision. As his shock morphed back into confidence, he knew he had to keep going. But the near run-in with the police wasn’t the only obstacle Ross had faced to get here.
Besides the reality that he still had to manage Good Wagon Books, his nonprofit book business, and his five part-time employees, he had also continued his quest to code the site alone.
The endless issues that had arisen when he tried to write the necessary code had left Ross so lost at times that he had no choice but to call an old friend, Richard Bates, whom he had met years earlier at the University of Texas, and ask for help. Ross was careful not to tell Richard what he was actually working on, but rather described his Web site as a “top secret” project. In a world where everyone has a start-up idea that they consider “top secret,” Richard didn’t really question his old friend and helped debug the PHP—the programming language—that Ross had tangled into a jumbled mess.
But all of that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that Ross Ulbricht was ready to launch his new venture: the Silk Road.
There was, however, still one major question that gnawed at him. Would anyone use the site? Even if you could make a store that didn’t have any laws or rules, would people actually want to shop there?
If this became just another line on Ross Ulbricht’s résumé of failures, he would be destroyed. By himself he had essentially done the work of a twelve-person start-up, acting as the front-end programmer, back-end developer, database guy, Tor consultant, Bitcoin analyst, project manager, guerrilla marketing strategist, CEO, and lead investor. Not to mention the in-house fungiculturist. It would have cost more than a million dollars of people’s time to replicate the site. Plus thousands of lines of PHP and MySQL code needed to connect to the Bitcoin blockchain—list of transactions—and a dozen widgets and whatnots in between. If it failed, Ross didn’t know what he would do with himself.
But something told him this time was different, that maybe, in some strange and cosmic way, this site was why he was here, and he was going to do everything he could to see it reach its full potential. To help people, to free them, through his Web site.
He had an entire plan for how he would let the world know about his new creation, all anonymously. But first he had to tell one person—in person—about the site.
He wandered into the living room where Julia sat and announced it was time for a demonstration. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people of all ages, and of course Julia, please take your seats. The presentation is about to begin. Ross informed Julia that the site was finally ready and he wanted, so proudly, to show it to her. He began by asking for her silver MacBook. “So first,” Ross said as he typed, “you will need to download Tor; remember, Tor is a Web browser which makes you completely anonymous online, so that the thieves”—Ross’s term for the government—“can’t see what you’re doing and searching for.”
“Good!” she declared. She was happy to download anything that protected her from the prying eyes of the thieves. Down with the thieves! She clapped her hands together.
“Next you go to this URL,” he said as he typed one of the strangest Web site addresses Julia had ever seen into this peculiar Tor Web browser: “tydgccykixpbu6uz.onion.” While it might have looked like these letters were the result of a cat walking across his keyboard, Ross explained that this was just part of the safety and anonymity of Tor.
As the site slowly loaded onto Julia’s computer screen, Ross smiled, turning the laptop back in her direction. There, in all its splendid, anonymous glory, was the tiny world Ross had been working on all this time. An anonymous marketplace where, as advertised on the page now staring back at Julia, you could buy and sell anything, without fear of the government peering over your shoulder or throwing you in a cage.
“Wow,” Julia said as she grabbed the laptop with both hands, “you did it, baby! So how do you buy stuff?”
Ross showed her what was for sale and how it worked. When he clicked on a green “Drugs” link, it led to a section titled “Psychedelics.” And there, for sale on the Silk Road, were the magic mushrooms Ross had grown a few months earlier, listed for sale as if he were hawking a used bicycle or a box of Girl Scout cookies on Craigslist.
He then explained how to buy Bitcoins, the currency needed to buy drugs on the site. It was like buying coins at a video arcade. You exchanged your cash for tokens, and then you got to play. Just as at an arcade, at the end of the day, no one knew who had used those tokens because they all looked the same. (Bitcoin wasn’t just meant for illegal purchases, either; you could use the digital cash to buy things on dozens of legitimate Web sites around the world.)
“Give me your credit card,” Ross said as he navigated to an online Bitcoin exchange, where Julia could interchange her real dollars for digital gold. They typed in her credit card information and watched as the page loaded.
“How will anyone else know how to do this?” Julia said.
Ahh, good question from the audience . . . but here at the Silk Road, we’ve thought of everything.
Ross explained that he had set up a blog post that was essentially an instruction manual explaining how to go through the process he was now demonstrating to Julia.
“But how will people find that site?” she asked.