Nick Bilton
Appearances
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Trump went to the Libertarian Conference, and the room's filled with all these people, and they're holding up these Free Ross signs to say Free Ross Ulbricht.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And everything that comes out of Trump's mouth is met with a boo.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And that was when the room burst into applause and cheers. And so for me, it was like if he was going to win, which I believed he was going to win, then Ross was going to be free. We're going to get him home.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
So Ross Ulbricht is a guy who came from Austin, Texas. Upper middle class, very nice, caring family. He was a really sweet kid. You know, there's all these little anecdotal stories about him.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
One of my favorites of which he was with a friend walking down the street in Austin one day, stops at the flower stall and buys some roses and then hands them back to the woman who works there and then continues to walk. His friend says, well, why did you do that? And he said, because no one ever buys flowers for the person who works at the flower stall. you
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
He goes off to college and he gets into, not drugs, but you know, like the stuff we all do, like smoking a little weed and like, you know, taking some acid or whatever it is. The usual stuff the kids these days do in college.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And he also gets into this, he really falls deeply into the libertarian philosophy that the government should have no say in what it is that you put in your body or what you do with your own body, with yourself. If you want to take drugs, you should be able to, you shouldn't go to jail for that.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And that the problem with the war on drugs is that it has created a system where people only buy and sell these things in dark alleys and in dangerous places, which has led to so much crime around drugs and so on. And that if you legalize all drugs imaginable, You would essentially stop all the harm that happens to society.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And if you made it that you could buy these drugs in an Amazon like forum, people who sold bad drugs that kill people would get bad ratings and you wouldn't buy from them anymore. And the good people that cut their drugs up really nicely would become, you know, the best sellers and so on. He learns about this thing called the Tor Onion Browser.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And what the Tor Onion Browser is, is it's a completely untraceable browser. And then along comes Bitcoin. And he has this realization like, oh my God, I can pair the Tor Onion Browser with Bitcoin and I can create the website that is the Amazon of Drugs, which becomes the Silk Road.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Well, and there's the original Silk Road, which went through China and... Right. That's not the one that this kid from Austin invented. Yeah, that's the Marco Polo version of it. So the way the Silk Road, it starts off, right, with that you are able to buy just drugs that are for sale. So to do this, to prove his thesis...
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Ross Ulbricht, he rents a cottage, like a secret place in Bastrop Park in Austin, and he secretly starts to grow magic mushrooms. And he does it, ironically, while he is watching the show Breaking Bad.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Eventually he gets enough mushrooms that he fills a big trash bag with them. And he goes to his website and he posts the mushrooms on the website and waits for a buyer. And then what he does is he starts to go to these forums online anonymously. And he says, hey, has anyone seen this website, the Silk Road, where you can buy and sell drugs? And then one day someone orders some and he mails them.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And he's like, holy shit, I sold some drugs. This is amazing. On my website, it worked. And then what happened is it started to spread, and soon people started listing other drugs like marijuana and acid and things like that. A few months go by, and then Gawker, the website, writes about it. RIP. And in that moment, it explodes. It becomes national. It's covered in the news.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And so the website gets this national, which then turns into international attention. And before you know it, he's selling hundreds of millions of dollars of drugs. And then it starts to move to much more nefarious things than just basic weed and magic mushrooms. There's a debate about whether they should sell body parts on there.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
They start selling, they create another version of the site where they start selling guns. Proves to be a little bit more difficult because it's harder to mail those to people. But it was a free-for-all. Anything you wanted to buy and sell was available on this marketplace, and all you needed was a few Bitcoin and the Tor Onion browser, and that was it.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
But what happens with Ross and the website is it gets to a point where he's making so much money and so many drugs and things are being sold through there that it captures the attention of people in China. And in China at the time, this is where they started to make this thing called fentanyl. But what the Silk Road enabled...
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
was people in China who were making these very, very, very dangerous drugs to mail them over here. And what you start to see happen is essentially the beginning of the fentanyl epidemic. And the first people that are affected by it are kids who are buying much less expensive drugs versions of heroin without worrying. You know, the thesis proves true.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
I don't have to worry about being mugged by a drug dealer in the middle of the park at night. I can just buy it on this website. But the part that Ross didn't think about was that kids were getting these drugs, had no idea how to use them, and started overdosing and dying. And of course, the government was desperately trying to figure out how to stop it while all this was going on.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
How do they catch the pirate? Yeah. What ends up happening is Carl Force, this guy from the DEA, he goes undercover on the Silk Road working for Ross Ulbricht. And this guy, Sean Bridges, Sean is a Secret Service agent. They get together. and they find out one of the employees who works for the Dread Pirate Roberts, and they do a raid on his house, and they arrest him.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And the Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross Ulbrich, thinks this employee has run off with his money. But really what's happened is he's been arrested. So the Dread Pirate Roberts starts talking to this person who tells him that he kills people, if you ever need someone killed. And so the Dread Pirate Roberts reaches out to him and says, I have this employee, he stole my money, I want him dead.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Ross doesn't realize is that he's talking to the DEA agent who has arrested the employee who has supposedly stolen the money. So they fake the murder of this employee by fake drowning him and filming it and then pouring a can of like Campbell's Soup SpaghettiOs in his mouth and taking a picture to make it look like he's dead. Wow.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And the Dreadpile Robbers pays them, but rather than take the money and give it to the feds as they should have, they keep the money. That's going on concurrently as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS are actually trying to solve the case. There's a big meeting with all of the agencies, IRS, FBI, everything.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
This thing is getting so big, there's literally hundreds of millions of dollars in sales that have happened. And the pressure really gets turned up for this thing to get taken down, also because we're starting to see these synthetic drugs starting to come into the country. And they decide they're going to do this big sting operation in San Francisco. And there was a little library there.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
It was a tiny library, two stories tall, the Dread Pirate Roberts. He doesn't like going on the internet to do his Silk Road work from his apartment in case it's ever traced back. And one day he goes to the local library in Bernal Heights and the federal agents are following him.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And he goes and he logs on and two agents are sitting in the library across from him and they get into a fake screaming match. And when he looks up to see what's going on, another agent swoops in, grabs the laptop and all of the other agents grab him and arrest him.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
And he's sentenced for distributing narcotics, using the internet to distribute narcotics, all of these different things. And the judge said, I believe that there are good in people and there are bad in people. And she says, I believe that there is good in you and bad in you. But what you did was it started an entire new paradigm of crime in this country and people died as a result of it.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
How quickly does a movement to free him spring up? There is immediately a movement that starts, and it actually starts during the trial. And it grows and it grows and it grows as crypto grows and Bitcoin and all these other things become these mainstream topics.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
Look, there's an argument to be made that pre the Silk Road and the Dread Pirate Roberts, there was nothing that you could do with Bitcoin that made any sense. So a lot of people got incredibly rich as a result of the things that Ross Ulbricht did. And so they probably see him as some sort of like, you know, Bitcoin deity that they have to praise.
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
When does Donald Trump enter the chat? When he was president as number 45, there were discussions, funnily enough, about freeing Ross, about pardoning him on his way out. And from what I have heard, there was a lot of people that didn't want that to happen in the White House because that wasn't law and order. Trump 45 was very anti-drugs. And I think Trump 47...
Today, Explained
The Silk Road pardon
is so enmeshed with the tech community, and the tech community sees anything anyone does with technology as a good thing, and they lock arms and sail off into the sunset together.