Silk Road Shutdown
The FBI today arrested Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old physicist and material scientist from San Francisco. He is accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts – the legendary administrator of Silk Road, the large black market on the Deep Web. The page, known as the eBay of the drug trade, was only available via the Tor network, was paid exclusively with bitcoins.
Silk Road has gained popularity since its foundation in 2011 and soon dominated drug trafficking on the Internet. The news of the shutdown put the Bitcoin traders in panic. The course crashed violently for a short time, but soon started again.
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Ross Ulbricht A.K.A. Dread Pirate Roberts felt comfortable behind goal and Bitcoin. Recently, he gave an anonymous interview to an anonymous interview to a Forbes reporter and sounded that the Silk Road had won the US government’s struggle against the drugs. The Dread Pirate Roberts, known for his Paranoia, finally brought down some mistakes. Investigators searched for the relevant forums and came across a user who applied at the time when the Silk Road started the site. A little later the same user had searched for a software developer and given his real email address. The decisive factor, however, was that Canadian border officials discovered a package addressed to Ulbricht, which contained the fake ID card with his photo.
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Ross Ulbricht lived in a shared apartment in San Francisco and did his admin work from an internet café. The Silk Road servers are abroad and not located, but the US investigators have an image of Ulbricht data, which is why the shutdown should still have an aftermath for many customers of the page. It was also known that 957.000 users were registered with the Silk Road, but it is unclear whether every account also corresponds to a real person. When arrested, 26.000 bitcoins confiscated, which is by far the largest Bitcoin total ever confiscated by authorities. According to the indictment, Ulbricht is not only accused of the conspiracy for drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering, but also, but also to have paid a bounty for the murder of someone who has blackmailed him to publish customer data from Silk Road.
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What this means for Bitcoin cannot yet be seen in spite of the current course skipers. On the one hand, it cannot be denied that the Silk Road also has the need for bitcoins that was dedicated to the acquisition of illegal substances. On the other hand, the Silk Road was always a curse for the Bitcoin because it made it easy for all of its critics to discredit the virtual currency as a drug money. So this should be good news for the seriousness of the bitcoin.