Silk Road shut down in October 2013 after the FBI intervened. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the website, is currently carrying two life sentences.
It has been approximately ten years since January 2011, when Silk Road appeared. Silk Road was a website that already closed its doors and once functioned as a market for illicit products, accepting bitcoin (BTC) as a payment means.
With Ross Ulbricht, the site’s founder, serving two life sentences in prison, the court case is far from finding a resolution. Among other essential facts, it is pending to recover 400,000 lost BTC, and possibly they are in a computer that could not seize such figure at the time. Occasionally, the case returns to the headlines of specialized media as well as discussion in the community.
Beyond the controversy surrounding the case and the enlightenment of aspects that, for many people, are disgraceful, such as trafficking in illicit substances, Silk Road was the first market to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment and dictated the price of the cryptocurrency during a time.
Silk Road: Bitcoin’s integration Into the Dark Web
Although the dark web design facilitates anonymity during its exploration, no default configuration guarantees it. Organizations such as the FBI, DEA, and other police agencies worldwide frequently visit this dark area of the Internet and often track user traffic that happens there.
The dark web is also the favorite place of hackers and cybercriminals. They can operate and get all kinds of things, from products and services (legal or illegal) to sensitive, filtered or classified information. The Tor browser is the most usual tool those kinds of users apply to access the dark web. This tool facilitates the anonymity of the user.
But even within the dark web, with its benefits in favor of anonymity, Silk Road did not have the necessary resources to work correctly because payment methods such as PayPal, Payoneer, and debit or credit cards are not anonymous at all.
In February 2011, when Silk Road was three weeks old, an account allegedly under the control of Ulbricht posted on the BitcoinTalk forum a post about the portal’s performance so far.
The use of bitcoin for payments, and Tor for anonymous browsing, was a perfect combination for Silk Road, which then started to attract the attention of many corners of the Internet.
Silk Road Magnified the Bitcoin Market in its Young Years
Anyone who wanted to buy on the site could set registration for free; if a user wanted to register as a seller, they had to buy the account with BTC through an auction mechanism. Besides, each purchase of items on the site came with a charged commission in BTC by Silk Road.
The interest in buying the cryptocurrency increased many Silk Road users, which undoubtedly influenced and pushed the small Bitcoin market. It is essential to consider how an utterly anonymous site on the dark wave started a revolution in the crypto-world by legitimizing Bitcoin as a valid exchange that could expand a substantial market.
By: Jenson Nuñez
