The day after the Gawker article, Ross got up, groggy and on edge, and was greeted by a total catastrophe. No, the site hadn’t been shut down by law enforcement. Or knocked off-line by hackers. Nothing like that. It was much worse.
While some people had simply come to the Silk Road to window-shop, others were actually buying and selling drugs. And every time someone purchased something, some of Ross’s Bitcoins vanished in the transaction. What the hell is going on? There must be a bug in the code. His personal profits, which were now in the double-digit thousands of dollars, were literally dwindling by hundreds of dollars every few hours. Ross had to figure out how to fix a problem he hadn’t even known existed.
It was sickening.
After digging through his code for hours trying to find the error, Ross realized he had originally built the Silk Road using a standard piece of code called “bitcoind,” which connected his payment system. Now he was discovering that he had created that interface improperly. He just had no idea where the mistake was in his code. All he knew was that he had essentially built a cash register where money fell out of the bottom into the ether whenever he opened it. And right now, as slews of new customers came to the site, that register was opening and closing at a staggering rate.
When he did the math, at the speed with which people were buying drugs on the site, the Silk Road was fast approaching insolvency. He would soon be the first person in history to start an underground drug Web site on the Internet and the first person in history to see it go bankrupt because he had written so much shitty code.
Ross had no choice but to start with the problems he could manage. He made the painful decision to shut off new user sign-ups to the Silk Road, which would help the servers handle the onslaught of visitors, albeit slightly. Next up was figuring out why his money was disappearing with every transaction. This would require rewriting programming language he clearly didn’t know how to write in the first place.
For the next few days Ross barely slept, and ate even less. Julia tried to keep him afloat with his favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but after delivering one to his side, she would come back hours later to see the sandwich sitting untouched next to his laptop.
Through it all, anxiety pecked away at his insides.
After almost a week of these major issues, after the site had gone down and the senators had declared war on the Silk Road and its founder, the reality of what he was doing, and what the consequences were, started to settle in.
“They’re looking for me,” Ross said to Julia in an almost catatonic and exhausted state one evening.
“No shit they are looking for you!” she responded.
She had seen Ross like this before, when he had been caught growing mushrooms months earlier. A strange look of excitement and fear had shown in his face back then too. Almost as if there were two different people inhabiting Ross’s body. One was a timid and sweet boy who truly wanted to help people and make the world a safer place; the other, a recalcitrant rebel who was ready to take on and fight the entire U.S. government. Sweet Ross and Rebel Ross.
“Ross, maybe it’s time to stop doing this,” Julia said to him after she, too, had realized the potential consequences. “Maybe this is growing too big and too quickly.”
But Sweet Ross didn’t respond. Instead, Rebel Ross was toiling away trying to figure out the problems with the code that were making his profits on the Silk Road evaporate. Not only was he not going to take Julia’s advice to stop working on the site, he was instead going to batten down the hatches so those U.S. senators would never be able to find him.
Chapter 13
JULIA TELLS ERICA
Calm washed over Julia as she lay on the floor listening to the orchestra of sounds outside the window. New York’s police sirens wailed; the trees rustled; the Bronx elevated subway trains screeched and squealed. As she waited for the weed to kick in, Julia felt relieved that she would be away from Ross for a week.
“Here you go,” her friend Erica said as she leaned over and passed the joint back to Julia.
Julia pulled the embers back toward her lips, swallowing the skunklike air into her lungs. She wondered if she should tell Erica the reason for the sudden visit to New York City. Julia hadn’t told anyone—not a solitary soul—about the Silk Road, the mushrooms, the senators, and the hackers Ross now employed to help him with his Web site. None of this had ever passed her lips. But lately she had become scared, not only for Ross but also for herself. She didn’t know if she was an accomplice in all this. She hadn’t written a line of code or profited a penny, but it still terrified her. For some perplexing reason, Ross had continued to share each new secret with her and expected her to keep them—and to be perfectly okay from a moral standpoint.
In the beginning, eight months earlier when Ross had started the Silk Road, she had been fine with these random unknowns, as the site was so small and unimportant. But things had changed since then.
Selling weed, she was fine with. She had never heard of a single recorded instance of someone overdosing from a bong hit. And mushrooms, well, they grew in the ground and they made you happy. But in recent months new products had become available on the site. Crack, cocaine, heroin, variations of highly addictive drugs she had never even heard of that were made in secret labs in Asia. Her doubts grew.
“What if someone overdoses?” she said when crack and heroin surfaced on the Silk Road.
“We have a rating system,” he replied resolutely. “So if someone sells bad drugs, they get a bad rating and no one will buy from them again.”
“And if they’re dead? How are they supposed to give someone a bad rating if they’re dead?”
These conversations would go on for hours, just spinning, spinning, spinning, and finding no end. No matter what Julia said, Ross always had an answer, often baked in intellectual analysis or libertarian theory. When the tête-à-tête went round in circles too many times, he would simply end the conversation by saying, “Well, we will just have to disagree on this.”