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23 Mar 2019
21 min read
1
23
I blog about Ripple & XRP. FULL DISCLOSURE: All views are my own. I do not work for Ripple; I am not a professional financial analyst, and the majority of my crypto holdings are XRP.FAANG stands for …
I blog about Ripple & XRP. FULL DISCLOSURE: All views are my own. I do not work for Ripple; I am not a professional financial analyst, and the majority of my crypto holdings are XRP.FAANG stands for "Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google." These five stocks have become staples in mainstream finance investing when it comes to large Silicon Valley power-houses. Until this point, these companies have formed a unique blend of access and restriction for their user base when it comes to content. Netflix buys the rights to many independent films and projects, and even produces its own fantastic array of content, known as "Netflix originals." And where Netflix focuses on video content, Amazon has expanded its umbrella to include all media types, including music and written content (e-books). Google, in addition to its massive YouTube video collection, has an online marketplace for music and books. Facebook has shown its interest in connecting to online marketplaces. Each of these members of FAANG have so far enjoyed a virtual monopoly on most electronic content access, but there is discontent from the artistic and creative community. There are many stakeholders - mainly in the creative community of artists, writers, and musicians - that are not satisfied with the meager earnings they receive from these companies as opposed to more traditional modes of marketing and access. 1 2According to one article, musicians depending on Amazon royalties will need to have 366,169 streams per month to earn the equivalent of the monthly minimum wage in the United States. 3 This means that only a very small handful of artists can adequately support themselves through current varieties of content monetization if they rely only on these new media monopolies.And this need... this unexploited, massive, pent-up demand for better ways for creative types to both market their wares and receive payment, has prompted some refreshing innovations that are well on their way to becoming a reality.Coil, a new company that was founded by Stefan Thomas, the former Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, has joined ranks of other content monetization providers like Patreon to assist artists in receiving payment for their work.Coil takes an agnostic approach to the specific channel of content delivery, even allowing artists to use these FAANG sites if they so choose. For example, if a YouTube channel owner wants to monetize their handiwork, they can do that by plugging in their channel in their Coil account; each time a Coil-monetized browser views their channel content, they will receive a Coil payment, denominated in XRP.For those of us that are in the XRP community, this method of content monetization is a huge win-win. Many of us are creative types, but because there has been no reliable mechanism of content monetization aside from dependence on the meager payouts from these FAANG monopolies, we've been forced to consider our content creation as 'sideline gigs' only, while we pay the bills with more traditional, business-oriented occupations.Coil is just starting out, but the feedback from the larger crypto community has been overwhelmingly positive, and you can sense a massive pent-up demand for a way around the unhealthy dependence on these media giants.Those webmasters that are adept at technical topics enough to run their own ILP
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07 May 2014
45 min read
0
12
cryptography uses a binary key, in which the two parts are linked and both are required to decrypt and encrypt. By splitting the key into two linked parts, one part can be kept secret, while the …
cryptography uses a binary key, in which the two parts are linked and both are required to decrypt and encrypt. By splitting the key into two linked parts, one part can be kept secret, while the other is made public (the parts are typically linked mathematically—e.g., prime factorization or calculating the discrete logarithm—but any suitable mechanism could be used). The private key should not be easily deducible from the public key, yet the public key should be easily deducible from the private key (using so-called mathematical trap-door functions). A trap-door function such as exponentiation modulo is based on the mathematical belief that it is easy to calculate the remainder when a number is raised to some power, divided by another (the modulus), yet, if given all the information other than the exponent, it is very difficult to solve for the exponent (i.e., it is slow to compute the discrete logarithm). Only when the secret key is possessed is it easy to open the trap door, otherwise the calculation is slow (but certainly tractable). Asymmetric-key setups offer several interesting possibilities. The key used to encrypt a message is not the same key used to decrypt it, so I may encrypt a message with your public key, in which only you can decrypt (using your linked private key). Configured this way, I can send you a message that only you can read (akin to placing a piece of mail in a publicly-accessible but locked mailbox), and you can do the same for me by using my public key, ensuring confidentiality.xvii Similarly, if I encrypt a message with my private key and send you both my (cleartext) message and the encrypted message (or a “digest” of it), your ability to decrypt the encrypted message with my public key ensures that the message is authentic (non-repudiated, i.e., guaranteed to be mine). These features work to permit secret message communication without ever requiring a secret communication channel, or to ensure that a message has not been changed. In a world where the communication channel is necessarily open to eavesdropping, asymmetrical-key cryptography performs a kind of magic trick: secret messages over public channels without ever requiring the prior transmission of secret information. A related application of asymmetric-key cryptography is the hash function. A hash function is a set of permutations that transform some data into a fixed-sized output (a digest), which changes considerably given even a slightly different input datum. When a hash function uses cryptographic mechanisms to create the digest it can be used to ensure the message is not repudiated (its integrity can be verified), which is especially useful for creating compact, easily transmittable “fingerprints” of data. Similarly, by computing a hash for a password, the hash may be stored in place of the secret password, and authenticated against the digest representation instead of the actual password (allowing the digest to be captured by an adversary without losing secrecy). The hash algorithm used in Bitcoin is SHA-256, a protocol for hashing in the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 family that outputs 256 bit digests. SHA-256 is composed of a simple set of logic transformations configured to perform the necessary mathematical trap-door function required by the asymmetric-key cryptography. Thus, described in as many of levels of abstraction as I can muster, from the basics of digital computation to a full ASCII-encoded hash digest, the SHA-256 hash algorithm operates as follows. Electromagnetic flux is discretized on a clock-cycle. Bits are then transformed using logical operations performed by transistors. The binary representation is collected into 64 bit “words” that function as high-level data structures (integers). Mathematical trap-door/one-way functions are constructed from the set of transformations (+, and, or, xor, shr, rot), with the entire algorithmic structure corresponding to the Merkle–Damgård padding and compression scheme (Figure 6). The resulting 256-bit hash digest may then be encoded into an ASCII-encoded character string for portability and human-readability. In sum, SHA-256 is the process of successively interpreting electric-magnetic flux as a series of different ordering mechanisms or techniques. The primary ordering is the first: from flux to binary, and once this discretization is accepted as real (by fiat) the ordering techniques are limited only by human imagination. The fundamental cryptographic algorithm used in Bitcoin is SHA-256, however, its conceptual utility draws on a recent history of academic and practical developments. Of the numerous developments, the most significant and relevant are: Ralph Merkle’s hash-trees (patent filed in 1979), David Chaum’s blind signatures (1982), Adam Back’s hashcash proof of work system (1997), Wei Dai’s b-money scheme (1998), Nick Szabo’s bit gold concept (1999), and Hal Finney’s reusable proofs of work (2004). In addition to having a hand in the invention of public key cryptography, Ralph Merkle developed a system for efficiently verifying large data structures through a tree structure of hash digests (Merkle, 1982). As described above, a hash digest can be used to verify the non-reputability of a datum, but for large data structures it would be extremely time-consuming to perform a hash function on every datum. Merkle realized that by organizing hash digests into a tree structure (where each node is a hash digest) it is possible to compute the hash digest for only the top-most node (while authenticating the left and right nodes) rather than every node, to ensure non-reputability. Hash trees are commonly used to ensure data integrity, but when used with cryptographic hash functions every prior message is checked for authenticity (none of the messages can be faked). Blind signatures are another result of public key cryptography being used in unexpected ways. In Chaum’s original concept for blinded signatures, payment systems with the anonymity of cash but the security of digital money (like Bitcoin) were the intended target (Chaum, 1982). By using public key cryptography Chaum proposed a system that ensured 1) the inability of third parties to determine information about the payee, 2) the ability of individuals to provide proof of payment, and 3) the ability to stop payments when needed (in cases of theft). Chaum envisioned a digital equivalent of paper envelopes lined with carbon paper. By writing a signature on the outside of the envelope a second “blind” signature is duplicated on the inside. In Chaum’s example of authenticated secret voting, the blinded signature is sent to the elector, removed from the envelope, signed by the elector, and mailed back to the voter in a new envelope (thus only the elector views the signature). If a voting dispute arises the signatures can be authenticated against the signatures on the envelopes, but each vote remains anonymous. While the mutability of binary digits is useful for much computing, a system of electronic cash requires the opposite quality: money needs to be made solid, slow, and non-(token)replicable. Originally proposed and developed by Adam Back (1997) for limiting email spam, hashcash uses two facts of public key cryptography: non-reputability of hash digests, and the computational difficulty of finding a hash “collision.” Due to the fact that it is nearly impossible to predict the outcome of a hash function on an arbitrary input (with current knowledge of the mathematical underpinnings of asymmetric-key cryptography used in hash functions), but easy to verify the results, a challenge-response mechanism can be created to require “work” (computational effort). By arbitrarily requiring a specified output of a hash function—such as that the first 20 or more bits of the hash digest must be zeros—the sender can establish a “difficulty” threshold. The only way to find a hash digest with a specified output is to compute the hash of a different input value over and over until the result meets the necessary difficulty, and since the result can be verified easily the receiver of the hash function does not need to repeat the computational work to verify that the sender expended a set amount of work. For its original purpose of limiting email spam, the requirement to perform work when sending email would make sending email slow and computationally expensive, thus, sending a single email would result in a modest slow-down, but sending millions would become nearly impossible (or at least would require many expensive computers). In such an email system any email that was sent without corresponding evidence of computational work would not pass verification by the receiver (which is a quick calculation, in comparison to performing the original hash calculation), and would be discarded as spam. As part of the discussion of applications to Back’s hashcash proposal on the Cypherpunks mailing list, Wei Dai proposed a system of currency generation using Back’s mechanism (Dai, 1998).xviii Dai applies Back’s hashcash mechanism in an effort to create a world where cryptography functions as the “medium of exchange,” and as a way to “enforce contracts” without the intervention of a government (Dai, 1998). Dai’s protocol for the creation of bmoney requires a specified amount of computational work (that anyone can perform), which is then verified by the community who update a collective ledger book, awarding the worker the specified funds. In the bmoney proposal, exchange of funds is accomplished by collective bookkeeping (authenticated with cryptographic hashes), and contracts are enforced through the broadcast and signing of transactions with digital signatures (i.e., public key cryptography). Hal Finney (2004) extended the bmoney and hashcash proposals by suggesting a formalization of the proof of work mechanism, a scheme that permits the reuse and exchange of proof of work tokens (hash digests). With these extensions it became possible for Nick Szabo (Szabo, 2008, 1997) to conceive a system that accurately calculates the “difficulty” of proof of work for the purpose of money generation, and to allow the generated money (hash digests) to be exchanged and reused. When the pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto proposed Bitcoin in 2008 it built on the crypto-anarchist developments from the following two decades (Nakamoto, 2008). In terms of invention, Bitcoin introduced a modest change to the bmoney, bit money (and other) proposals already in existence. Rather than require a single collective ledger of transactions, or awkwardly share the ledger among parties, Nakamoto suggested that a “blockchain” contain all transactions (including generated money by “miners” performing cryptographic proofs of work, described in more detail below). The blockchain is a Merkle hash tree of transactions. For each transaction the mining servers verify the hash digests that result from transactions, incentivised to perform computational work by being awarded money for successfully performing proofs of work. The transactions are verified by the miners and grouped into “blocks”; once the top node of each block is verified a specified amount of work is required to seal the block and win the resulting money. A full round of a transaction requires several steps. Money is stored in a wallet, which is a unique hash digest generated by each user (and any number of wallets are possible). To send you money I first digitally sign the transaction request with my private key (that is, I perform asymmetric-key encryption on the transaction request data). Using my public key, the network can verify my transaction request. The transaction request is sent (via peer-to-peer communication protocols) to the network and then
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04 Mar 2014
43 min read
8
96
[Note: below is chapter 3 to Great Chain of Numbers] As innovative and groundbreaking as Bitcoin has been, it has several known technical limitations.1 Simultaneously, the current development team is …
[Note: below is chapter 3 to Great Chain of Numbers] As innovative and groundbreaking as Bitcoin has been, it has several known technical limitations.1 Simultaneously, the current development team is hard at work on priorities revolving around improving the security of the protocol from vulnerabilities and exploits.2 This is not a criticism of their activities and actions, especially in light of the transaction malleability issue that caused frenetic activity within the ecosystem during the middle of February.3 Other developers in the community have tried to assume the mantle of responsibility for improving the functionality and capabilities of this space. Some projects involve fusing exoskeleton systems built around the Bitcoin protocol; others create their own independent ledgers; still others have even created bridges between Bitcoin and other ledgers. Below, I introduce eight projects that are currently developing a mechanism to design and transport smart contracts or smart contract functionality.4 For each, I attempted to interview the main developers. As noted above, one way to utilize a crypto blockchain to verify wares is through a process being developed called Colored Coins.5 In a nutshell, this endeavor allows users to “color” a token to represent a specific asset such as a car, home, boat, commodity, a share, a bond – virtually any type of asset (e.g., 0.5 BTC colored green to represent your home). These tokens can then be exchanged, just like bitcoin tokens, by anyone anywhere. This enables a decentralized, trustless form of asset management that uses a blockchain as both a ledger and transportation mechanism. Alex Mizrahi, who is leading the development of the Chroma Wallet used by the Colored Coins project says that “it is going to be very easy for the asset management industry as a whole to use Colored Coins.6 For example, some of the first places we are going to have adoption will likely be real-estate and portfolio management. In fact, for any type of asset management it’s going to be simple to issue his own color that represents his goods. A portfolio manager can issue one color that represents a portfolio of stocks backed by the real holding and sell it globally. If he is savvy and his products are good, his colors are going to have demand. So transferring ownership is very easy, quick and safe — just like bitcoins. In the real estate industry someone can issue their apartments using colored coins and have them float on the blockchain, or manage time-sharing based on color.”7 Meni Rosefeld, another member of the development team, described several of the advantages of using a secondary attribute (color) within the asset management industry. “The greatest advantage is the removal of barriers of entry. Currently, new businesses wishing to raise capital use cumbersome and inefficient private deals; and those aspiring to be listed in order to allow for the market to valuate them with an efficient mechanism, can only do so with a great expenditure. With colored coins, anyone can easily raise funds in exchange for equity, removing barriers of entry, encouraging innovation and allowing society as a whole to better allocate its resources between ventures.” One area of confusion within the Bitcoin community is the misplaced understanding – that centralized servers are needed to issue and track a secondary attribute (the “color”). According to Rosefeld, this is incorrect. “No centralized servers are needed for tracking – this is done in the decentralized network of the host currency (such as Bitcoin). There does need to be an entity issuing each particular colored coin – however, an entity raising funds for a generic purpose is not usually in the business of running an exchange. Without colored coins, they would have to resort to a large 3rd party exchange with all the usual problems of barrier of entry (for both issuers and exchanges) and vendor lock-in. With colored coins, they can outsource the tracking and exchange to the efficient decentralized network. The issuer is only involved when issuing or recalling the coins; investors can then trade the coins between themselves without involving any 3rd party, which has implications for privacy, efficiency, and the kind of advanced transactions one can do.” I also spoke with Amos Meiri, head of dealing at eToro, another member of the development team for the Colored Coins project.8 I asked: would it be easier to simply conduct all trade privately at the centralized exchange where it will be more scalable and private. In his view, “Centralized exchanges definitely have their advantages, but colored coins can be useful for following reasons. First, users do not need to trust their bitcoins to a centralized exchange. Companies cannot manipulate ownership records (to commit fraud, for example). So basically, if somebody gives you an IOU, it isn’t a good idea to leave it with the person who issued it or to affiliated parties. Another reason is that companies cannot control how its shares are being traded, thus it cannot block trade. And lastly, there is no need to maintain servers or manage security due to its integration with the blockchain.” While this is obviously easier said than done, as noted above, this idea of using cryptoledgers to manage smart property has inspired and motivated numerous other groups to put forth similar efforts. For example, Counterparty was launched in January.9 Its mysterious, relatively anonymous development team has released similar open-source applications, documents, binaries and tools that allow users and entrepreneurs to build smart property functionality such as derivatives and dividends in a decentralized manner. Also in January, reporter Jon Southurst discussed several other groups including Reality Keys that can utilize a crypto protocol to build a predictions market or a way to hedge against currency fluctuations.10 At the beginning of January 2014 I spoke with Taariq Lewis, the founder and CEO of BitcoinBusiness, a Bitcoin advisory firm and he is also the Smart Property and Business Development Lead of the Mastercoin Project.11 Mastercoin is a crowdfunded, non-profit endeavor to create an open-source decentralized exchange protocol for Bitcoin. As noted above, the Mastercoin project has received 4,700 bitcoins ($5 million at the time) in crowdfunding which has been used to pay for bounties, building tools and write documentation all of which is ultimately released on an open-source basis.1213 According to Lewis, “we are on the tip of the iceberg of the democratization of upper level finance and investment management. One apt analogy is that the current system involves a highly siloed, highly centralized organization reminiscent to the music industry prior to P2P innovations. We are now approaching the first
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01 May 2015
45 min read
2529
3928
The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 1 Click to share this story on Facebook Click to share this story on Twitter Click to comment on this story. (will open new tab) I’m sorry; your browser does not …
The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 1 Click to share this story on Facebook Click to share this story on Twitter Click to comment on this story. (will open new tab) I’m sorry; your browser does not support HTML5 video in WebM with VP8 or MP4 with H.264. “I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.”—home/frosty/documents/journal/2012/q1/january/week1 The postman only rang once. Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white, he was startled to hear someone at the door. It was 11 am, and surprise visits were uncommon at his modest house in Spanish Fork, Utah, a high-desert hamlet in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. Green ambled over, adjusting his camouflage fanny pack. At 47 his body was already failing him: He was overweight, with four herniated discs, a bum knee, and gleaming white dental implants. To get around he sometimes borrowed his wife’s pink cane. Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively. He peeked through the front window and caught a glimpse of the postman hurrying off. The guy was wearing a US Postal Service jacket, but with sneakers and jeans. Weird, Green thought. Also odd was a van Green noticed across the street, one he’d never seen before: white, with no logos or rear windows. Green opened the door. It was winter, a day of high clouds and low sun. A pale haze washed out the white-tipped Spanish Fork Peak rising above the valley. Green looked down. On the porch sat a Priority box—about Bible-sized. His little dogs watched him pick up the mystery package. It was heavy, had no return address, and bore a postmark from Maryland. Green considered the package and then took it into his kitchen, where he tore it open with scissors, sending up a plume of white powder that covered his face and numbed his tongue. Just then the front door burst open, knocked off its hinges by a SWAT team wielding a battering ram. Quickly the house was flooded by cops in riot gear and black masks, weapons at the ready. There was Green, covered in cocaine and flanked by two Chihuahuas. “On the floor!” someone yelled. Green dropped the package where he stood. When he tried to comfort his pups, a dozen guns took aim: “Keep your hands where we can see them!” Officers cuffed Green on the floor while fending off Max, the older Chihuahua, who bared his tiny fangs and bit at their shoelaces. Splayed out on the carpet, Green was eye level with dozens of boots: A large tactical team—SWAT and DEA agents—fanned out through the house. He could hear things crashing, some officers yelling, others whispering to each other. He looked at the busted door and thought, Man, that thing was unlocked. On the living room wall hung family photos—his wife, Tonya, their two daughters, and a grandson—smiling brightly above Green, lying amid $27,000 worth of premium flake. (The package was stamped with a red dragon, the symbol for high-quality Peruvian.) Over the whole scene was a needlepoint that said: if i had known you were coming, i would have cleaned up! Excited by the company, little Max stopped shaking just long enough to crap right in the living room. The fact was, Green wasn’t just your average Mormon grandpa. Over the past few months he had been handling customer service for the massive online enterprise called Silk Road. It was like a clandestine eBay, a digital marketplace for illicit trade, mostly drugs. Green, under the handle Chronicpain, had parlayed his extensive personal narcotics knowledge—he’d been on pain meds for years—into a paying gig working for the site. Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google. To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, the site allowed thousands of drug dealers and nearly 1 million eager worldwide customers to find each other—and their drugs of choice—in the familiar realm of ecommerce. For a brief time, from 2011 to 2013, it was a wild success. In that relatively short span, Silk Road managed to rack up (depending on how you count) more than $1 billion in sales. Which is why Green found himself surrounded by an interagency task force. He had been hired by Dread Pirate Roberts, the mysterious figure at the center of Silk Road. DPR, as he was often called, was the proprietor of the site and the visionary leader of its growing community. His relatively frictionless drug market was a serious challenge to law enforcement, who still had no idea who he or she was—or even if DPR was a single person at all. For over a year, agents from the DEA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the IRS, the Secret Service, and US Postal Inspection had been trying to infiltrate the organization’s inner circle. This bust of Green and his Chihuahuas in the frozen Utah desert was their first notable success. The Feds got Green on his feet. They had a lot of questions, starting with why he had $23,000 cash in his fanny pack and who was on the other end of the encrypted chat dialogs on his computer. Green said, improbably, that the money was his tax return. He also asked for his pain medication. Instead they escorted him to the door and into a squad car, informing him that he’d be booked for possession of 1,092 grams of cocaine with intent to distribute. “Don’t take me to jail,” Green pleaded. “He knows everything about me.” Later, under interrogation, Green told the skeptical agents that to charge him and make his name public was a potential death sentence. Dread Pirate Roberts was dangerous, he said: “This guy’s got millions. He could have me killed.” Ross Ulbricht was deep into his regular drum circle when he spotted her. As Ross slapped the hide on his djembe, a West African drum, Julia Vie sat across the circle. She had a head full of curls, light brown skin, and dark brown eyes. The drum circle was assembled on a lawn at Penn State, where in 2008 Ross was working toward a master’s degree in materials science and engineering. Julia was 18, a free-spirited freshman, and when she noticed Ross she felt a powerful attraction. Not long after, Julia visited Ross’ campus office, where they couldn’t help but kiss and fall into a carnal heap on the floor. Both were smitten. Ross studied crystallography, working on thin-film growth. One day he made a large, flat blue crystal, affixed it to a ring, and gave it to Julia. She had no idea how her boyfriend could make a crystal, but she knew she was in love. Ross had grown up in Austin, Texas, and had always been smart and charming. He’d been the kind of kid who was an Eagle Scout—and let his friends give him a mohawk on a whim. He was raised in a tight family. They’d spend summers in Costa Rica; Ross’ parents had built a series of rustic, solar-powered bamboo houses there, near an isolated point break where Ross learned to surf. In high school, “Rossman,” as friends called him, drove an old Volvo, smoked plenty of pot, and still got a 1460 on his SATs. To friends, Ross was carefree but also caring. Ross earned a scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas and majored in physics. From there he landed a graduate scholarship at Penn State, where he excelled as usual. But he wasn’t happy with the drudgery of lab research. Since college he’d been exploring psychedelics and reading Eastern philosophy. At Penn State, Ross talked openly about switching fields. He posted online about his disenchantment with science—and his new interest in economics. He’d come to see taxation and government as a form of coercion, enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence. His thinking was heavily influenced by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, a totem of the modern American libertarian orthodoxy. According to von Mises, a citizen must have economic freedom to be politically or morally free. And Ross wanted to be free. When he finished his master’s in 2009, he moved back to Austin and bought Julia a plane ticket to join him. She left school, and they got a cheap apartment together. It was cramped, but they were young and dreamy. Both imagined they might get married. Ross tried day trading, but it didn’t go well. He started a videogame company. That failed too. The setbacks were devastating. He didn’t want to be trying; he wanted to be doing. During this time, his downstairs neighbor, Donny Palmertree, invited Ross to work with him on Good Wagon Books, a business that collected used books and sold them in digital storefronts like Amazon and Books-A-Million. Ross built Good Wagon’s website, learned inventory management, and wrote a custom script that determined a book’s price based on its Amazon ranking. In his spare time Ross read, hiked, improved his yoga, and, as Julia fondly recalls, had “lots and lots of great sex.” But they also argued, about politics (she was a Democrat), money (what he called “frugal,” she called “cheap”), and their social life (she partied more than he did). Their relationship turned stormy, with frequent breakups. In the summer of 2010, they split up yet again. He was heartbroken, later telling a woman he met on OkCupid how he’d recently been in love and was trying to get over it. Ross was adrift. “I went through a lot over the year in my personal relationships,” he wrote in a journal on his computer, a kind of self-assessment of life goals. “I had left my promising career as a scientist to be an investment adviser and entrepreneur and came up empty-handed.” Ross felt ashamed, but not long afterward Palmertree got a job in Dallas, leaving Good Wagon to Ross. For years, all he’d wanted was to be in charge of something. Now he was. In the Good Wagon warehouse, Ross oversaw five part-time college students sorting, logging, and organizing the 50,000 books on shelves he built himself. That December was Good Wagon’s best month, clearing 10 grand. But by the end of 2010, the new CEO of Good Wagon was looking beyond the book business. During his forays into trading, Ross had discovered bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency. The value of bitcoin—based only on market factors, unattached to any central bank—aligned with his advancing libertarian philosophy. On his LinkedIn page, Ross wrote that he wanted to “use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.” To that end Ross had a flash of insight. “The idea,” he wrote in his journal, “was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them.” He wrote that he’d “been studying the technology for a while but needed a business model and strategy.” Like most libertarians, Ross believed that drug use was a personal choice. And like all people paying attention, he observed that the war on drugs was a complete failure. The natural merchandise for his new enterprise would be drugs. “I was calling it Underground Brokers,” Ross wrote, “but eventually settled on Silk Road.” Ever the capable scientist, Ross decided to cultivate his own psilocybin mushrooms as a starter product. He was spending time with Julia again, while struggling with programming his site and still running Good Wagon. Then, one night in early 2011, Good Wagon collapsed. In the literal sense. Ross was working late, alone in the warehouse, when he heard an enormous crash—the sound of the library falling apart. He’d carefully designed the entire system but had somehow forgotten two vital screws, the ones that held it all together; the shelves came down, every single one, like dominoes. When Ross broke the news to Palmertree, he also admitted that his heart wasn’t in Good Wagon anymore. They agreed to close the company, with no hard feelings. He told Palmertree that he already had a new business idea—“something really big.” Silk Road went live in mid-January 2011. A few days later came the first sale. Then more. Ross eventually sold all 10 pounds of his mushrooms, but other vendors started joining. He was handling all the transactions by hand, which was time-consuming but exhilarating. It wasn’t long before enough vendors and users made it a functioning, growing marketplace. Just before the launch, facing a new year and a blank slate, Ross had resolved to change his life. “In 2011,” he wrote to himself, “I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.” I’m sorry; your browser does not support HTML5 video in WebM with VP8 or MP4 with H.264. Special agent Carl Mark Force IV was half-asleep when the postal inspector started talking about something weird in the parcel sorters. “Just wanna let everybody know about this,” the inspector said, delivering his brief to a conference room full of bored law enforcement personnel. “We are having problems with drugs coming through the mail.” Force was a Baltimore-based DEA agent, and he was at a regional interagency meeting, a periodic intel show-and-tell with analysts from the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, and Homeland Security. “It’s coming from an underground drug site,” the inspector said, “called Silk Road.” Force sat up. This was the kind of thing he was looking for. He had burned out on the grind of arresting street dealers. At 6 feet and 200 pounds, Force was an athletic guy, and coming up through the agency he’d loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass. But after countless raids, the adrenaline had worn off. And in the grand scheme of things, who cared about confiscating a few grams? He was pushing 50 and still on the federal payroll in a regional office. That’s when you want to find a big case and get out. And so he went looking for leads in meetings like this, which were mostly yawners—until now. By the time Force heard about Silk Road, it had been around nearly a year. The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin! Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash,
BIO:
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