The subject, thankfully, changed as people told stories from a decade earlier. While Ross laughed, he appeared embarrassed by what had just happened. Sure, his friends had mundane nine-to-five jobs, but they had jobs. And what did Ross have on his résumé? Two degrees and a series of dead ends. He wanted so badly to have an impact. To do something or build something that was bigger than a nine-to-five.
It was late by the time Ross and Julia hugged everyone good-bye and slipped back into the truck for the drive back to Austin. As Ross slammed his car door closed and pulled his seat belt across his chest, Julia could sense something wasn’t right. The car reversed down the driveway and onto the winding road.
“Nothing I’ve done has worked out,” he lamented. “I really haven’t accomplished anything great.” The cedar trees zipped by in the darkness.
“Oh, honey,” she replied, “it’s okay. You’re trying different things. You’ll find—”
Ross spoke over Julia. “I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I’ve tried to start all of these different things and nothing has worked.”
“It will. You just have to—”
He continued speaking as if he were alone in the truck. “I want to see some results,” he said. “I want to build something that is really successful.”
“You just have to keep trying.”
She was right, as Ross was about to see.
Chapter 7
THE SILK ROAD
Stuff, to Ross, was just that: stuff. He had no interest in any of it.
But there was one object Ross couldn’t live without: his laptop. That rectangular clamshell was, in many respects, Ross’s life. All of the files and folders it contained made up a map of his brilliant and, to many, enigmatic mind. And it was on that very computer that, on a late summer morning in 2010, Ross began working on a project that was going to change everything.
He had recently moved into an apartment with Julia, a live/work space in downtown Austin with shiny concrete floors. Julia had started a new business, which she called Vivian’s Muse, where she photographed half-naked women for their husbands. Her pitch was simple: What do you get the man who has everything? Sensual pictures of his wife, almost nude. And so, several days a week Julia would set up candles throughout the main room of the apartment, play sensual techno music, and snap thousands of boudoir pictures.
In the adjacent bedroom, as Ross would get to work on his latest project, he could hear the pop! pop! pop! of the camera flash and Julia commanding her muse, “Stick your ass in the air,” and “Now act like you’re having an orgasm!”
Their bedroom, where Ross often sat to work, was its usual mess, with Julia’s crumpled-up jeans, discarded dresses, and underwear littering the floor. When they weren’t working, they spent hours under the covers, snuggling or watching TV shows on Ross’s laptop.
The latest show they had become obsessed with was Breaking Bad. They would cuddle on the bed, warmed by the glow of Ross’s screen, as Walter White transformed into the terrifying and mysterious drug kingpin Heisenberg, a man who justified his evil along intellectual lines. Ross liked the drama, and it was hard not to appreciate what Heisenberg had done. Once an underachieving, largely browbeaten high school chemistry teacher, Walter White found in drugs the best way to express his technical brilliance as a chemist and businessperson. What he did may have been terrible and destructive, but he did it with such beauty and so adroitly that, to him at least, the very sin was absolved by the manner in which it was carried out.
Still, Ross thought the story line was a bit far-fetched. “That would never happen in real life,” he said to Julia.
When he wasn’t watching the show, Ross was now tinkering with his new idea in their Austin bedroom: an anonymous Web site where you could buy or sell anything imaginable.
The genesis of this concept had been lodged in Ross’s mind for some time. Just another one of the daydreams he hoped to build in the future. The only problem was, when he had first had this particular aha moment a year earlier, the technology he needed to realize it simply hadn’t existed.
At the time, he had contacted a man he’d met online who went by the nickname Arto. They had exchanged a few e-mails, with Ross asking Arto if it would be possible to build such an anonymous online store (primarily for illegal drugs, which Ross didn’t think should be illegal) that the government would have no control over.
Arto, who was clearly an expert on such matters, explained that most of the technology needed to make this idea happen existed. There was a Web browser called Tor, which enabled people to slip behind a curtain online into another, separate Internet—one where the U.S. government couldn’t track people because, thanks to Tor, everyone became invisible. Unlike the normal Internet, where Ross’s every move was stored in databases by Facebook or Google or Comcast, on this side of the Internet, called the Dark Web, you simply couldn’t be found.
But there were complicating factors to Ross’s idea. Specifically, in 2009 there wasn’t a good way to pay for these things anonymously online. Cash was too risky, and credit cards would leave evidence of someone buying a bag of cocaine from an illegal drug Web site.
For inspiration, Arto suggested that Ross should read a relatively unknown novel titled A Lodging of Wayfaring Men. The novel tells a tale of a group of libertarian freedom seekers who create an alternate online society on the Internet that operates using its own digital currency, free from government control. In the book this online world grows so quickly that the U.S. government becomes petrified by its power. FBI agents are sent out to try to stop the Web site before it destroys the very fabric of society.
Arto’s advice was remarkably inspiring to Ross, but the logistical issues remained. Specifically, that there wasn’t a way to pay for drugs on such a Web site.
And so, for a year, the idea sat on a shelf in Ross’s mind.
That was, until now. Ross had come across a technology that had recently emerged called Bitcoin. It was being billed as a new form of digital cash that was, from the research he had done, completely untraceable. Anyone in the world could use it to buy and sell anything without leaving digital fingerprints behind.