![]() On June 26 a video ad for Atlantis appeared on YouTube telling the story of "Charlie," a friendly-looking cartoon hipster. While Roberts waxes philosophical, his competitors are finding motivation enough in grabbing some of Silk Road's lucrative drug trade. "Silk Road is a vehicle for that message," he writes to me from somewhere in the Internet's encrypted void. "What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or 'sticking it to the man.' It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong." We have an important message, and the time is ripe for the world to hear it," says Roberts. Roberts also has a political agenda: He sees himself not just as an enabler of street-corner pushers but also as a radical libertarian revolutionary carving out an anarchic digital space beyond the reach of the taxation and regulatory powers of the state-Julian Assange with a hypodermic needle. ![]() We've withstood a lot, and it's not like our enemies are unaware any longer." "At the same time, Silk Road has been around two and a half years. letting people discover through word of mouth," Roberts says. "Up until now I've done my best to keep Silk Road as low profile as possible. Competitors, namely a newly launched site called Atlantis with a real marketing budget and a CEO with far less regard for his privacy, are stealing Roberts' spotlight. Given that those commissions are collected in Bitcoins, which have appreciated close to 200-fold against the dollar since Silk Road launched in 2011, the Dread Pirate Roberts and any other stakeholders in Silk Road have likely amassed millions in profits.ĭespite the giant DEA crosshairs painted on his back and growing signs that the feds are probing the so-called "dark Web" that Silk Road and other black market sites inhabit, Roberts spoke with FORBES in his first-ever extended public interview for a reason: As with physical drug dealing, a turf war has emerged. ![]() Silk Road takes a commission on all of its sales, starting at 10% and scaling down for larger transactions. One analysis of the Tor network performed by a student at Dublin's Trinity College found that Silk Road received around 60,000 visits a day, mostly users seeking to buy or sell drugs, along with other illicit items including unregulated cigarettes and forged documents. Since then the site has doubled its product listings, and revenue now hits an annual run-rate of $30 million to $45 million by FORBES' estimate. By the measure of Carnegie Mellon researcher Nicolas Christin, Roberts' eBay-like service was grossing $1.2 million a month in the first half of 2012. Postal Service, right under the federal government's nose. by light-years."Īnyone can download and run Tor, exchange some dollars or euros for the digital currency Bitcoin and go shopping on Silk Road for drugs that are vacuum-sealed and discreetly mailed via the U.S. The Drug Enforcement Administration won't comment on whether it's investigating Silk Road but wrote in a statement that it's aware of the site and is "very proactive in keeping abreast" of the digital underground's "ever-evolving technological advancements." Senator Chuck Schumer has demanded Silk Road be shut down and called it "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. In the last two and a half years Silk Road has grown into the Web's busiest bazaar for heroin, methamphetamines, crack, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy and enough strains of marijuana to put an Amsterdam coffee shop to shame. ![]() If Roberts is paranoid, it's because very powerful people really are out to get him. “The highest levels of government are hunting me,” says Roberts. Like a long, blindfolded ride in the back of some guerrilla leader's van, Tor is designed to prevent me-and anyone else-from tracking the location of Silk Road's servers or the Dread Pirate Roberts himself. Accessing the site requires running the anonymity software Tor, which encrypts Web traffic and triple-bounces it among thousands of computers around the world. All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums of the website he owns and manages, the Silk Road.
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