His few employees had helped pull him out of this depression, reiterating to their leader how proud they were to be a part of something so grand and revolutionary. Sure, they were being paid, with most making a few hundred dollars a week for their programming services, but it wasn’t just about the money; they were grateful to be involved.
One employee told Ross he had walked away from his other jobs and responsibilities in life “to pursue all of this.” The prospect of legalizing drugs and ensuring that future generations would not spend their lives in prisons for selling, or even doing, drugs was more important than anything else, the employee said. Another proclaimed proudly: “We really can change the world. . . . We are really lucky. . . . This opportunity is on the scale of a few times in a millennia.”
The tide had turned so much, and with so many prospects for the Silk Road, Ross had decided to start writing a diary. In one of his first journal entries, realizing the profundity of his vision, he wrote, “I imagine that some day I may have a story written about my life, and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.” There were plenty of reminders to illustrate his rising importance. From a financial standpoint the site was so successful and was processing so many orders that he had now become a millionaire. Though being frugal Ross, he didn’t buy anything showy with the money, beyond a few nice meals. All of his possessions still fit snugly in a small bag.
But while the Silk Road side of his life was perfect, he still was troubled that he had to lie to people. When his family and friends asked what he was doing for work, Ross told a different story to each of them. “I’m a day trader.” “I’m working on a video game.” “I buy and sell digital currencies.” Each time he told one of those stories, Ross was filled with guilt. He had always been obsessed with being “true to his word,” as he put it, and this constant deceit gnawed at his conscience.
It wasn’t like he could go to the Silk Road and be honest there, either. He had no choice but to lie to everyone there too—for obvious reasons. Though on several occasions he had slipped, sometimes by accident, more often because he needed to tell someone something. Ross had told Variety Jones one recent afternoon that he used to be an “experimental physicist.” He had blundered with Smedley, his new chief programmer, and told him about his travels through Australia and Asia. He had told his other employee, Inigo, about camping trips he used to take with his father, Kirk. On more than one occasion he had talked about how much he loved fishing.
Now Ross had a better system for separating fact from fiction. By becoming the Dread Pirate Roberts, he could wear a mask that made him into two different people. In the real world he would be Ross Ulbricht; online he would be the Dread Pirate Roberts.
“Yes, cap’n!”
As Ross, he could still talk about his ideals about legalizing drugs, libertarianism, and his work with Bitcoin, all without going anywhere near the Silk Road in his mind and, more important, never feeling like he was fibbing to those he loved. And once the Dread Pirate Roberts mask was slipped on, a different person could steer the ship into uncharted and potentially unethical waters. DPR could cross lines that Ross would never have come up against, all of which he had to negotiate to take the site to the next level.
“O captain, my captain.”
As the Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross didn’t have to constantly lie anymore. Except to himself.
Chapter 23
ROSS, HANGED OR HOME
Ross’s fingers throbbed as he typed. The red edges along the rims of his nails were nearly bleeding from his constant, savage biting. The problem was, he didn’t know how to stop himself. Anxiety would course through his body and the chewing would begin.
It was a pattern that was developing and Ross had no idea how to end it. One minute the site would be expeditiously moving along, as smooth as water to a stone, and then out of nowhere—BOOM!—some sort of cataclysmic event would occur. Server crashes, hackers trying to break into the Bitcoin bank, bad code that needed replacing, good code that needed updating, conflicts between drug buyers and drug dealers, lost packages, scam artists, and stolen Bitcoins. While these issues were understandable given the nature of his work, they would come out of nowhere and Ross was forced to fix them immediately, no matter where he was.
Sometimes these problems were easily resolvable (like plugging holes in the ship when hackers attacked). Other problems had been plaguing the site since it began (like finding where those holes were before the hackers found them). And yet occasionally, a problem arose that would cost Ross tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. For example, in a single day recently, he had found out, someone had managed to steal $75,000 in Bitcoins because of some second-rate programming Ross had written. Those were the days that he would begin incessantly biting his nails.
Luckily for Ross, losing $75,000 wasn’t going to bankrupt him. He was now making so much money from the site that he was having trouble laundering it into physical cash. Back in December the Silk Road had been processing $500,000 in drug sales each month. Now, in late March, the site was doing $500,000 in sales a week. When Variety Jones looked at the growth charts, his response to the Dread Pirate Roberts was apropos: “Fuck me,” he wrote. “I mean, in my mind I knew it, but seeing the graph, well . . . fuck me!” The graph he was referring to was of a yellow line that illustrated growth and profits on the site and pointed straight upward to the right and all the way off the page.
Variety Jones took a few minutes to do some math. His calculations predicted that, at the current growth rate, sales would be up to $1 million a week by April, just a month from now, and double that by midsummer. He told Ross that in the worst-case scenario 2012 would end up being a $100 million year for the site. And if things stayed on the current trajectory, by the end of 2013 the Silk Road would be processing nearly $1 billion a year in drug sales.
Ross’s cut from the commission fees was now averaging $10,000 a day and growing higher—quite literally—by the hour. In reality Ross’s wealth was doubling and tripling every few weeks as the exchange rate for Bitcoins rose. If Ross had $100,000 in one of his Bitcoin accounts on Monday, it could be worth as much as $200,000 by Friday without his doing a thing. If VJ’s predictions were correct, in a bear case Ross could personally be making $100 million a year by 2014. In a bull case, if the current value of Bitcoins continued to grow as it had been doing, he could be making ten times that in no time at all.