The founder of the online black market Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison in 2015. Now he's a free man, thanks to Donald Trump.
Last September, I attended a meetup near Atlanta titled “Bitcoin Enters the Mainstream Political Arena.” The group, mostly white, male, bearded thirty- and forty-year-olds, had gathered to discuss the surprising entry of cryptocurrency into politics. Donald Trump, who had called bitcoin “a scam” in 2021, had recently headlined a bitcoin conference and released ads saying things like “You know, they call me the crypto President.” At the door of the Atlanta event, held on the patio of an airplane hangar, sat a stack of Bitcoin Magazines with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s face on the cover.
Joey, a theatre director in attendance, explained Kennedy’s role in recent events: “When Kennedy came along—and he’s for bitcoin—Trump said, ‘Oh, shit, I’m gonna start losing people over bitcoin.’ So he shifted.” Joey shrugged. “We’ll take it.”
The crypto crowd, long the butt of jokes, was thrilled by its sudden shift in status—even if some doubted the authenticity or durability of Trump’s support. They were finally being taken seriously by one party, at least. T-shirts displayed their enthusiasm using insider lingo and jokes that, to the uninitiated, took a bit of explaining: “SINGLE, TAKEN, HODLING,” Joey’s shirt read. There were boxes beside each word; “HODLING” was checked. (“HODL” is an acronym for “hold on for dear life,” which refers to crypto’s crazy-making volatility.) Get it? I made the rounds, as the group of three dozen caught up, drank beer, and ate barbecue. I asked why most seemed enthusiastic about Trump. There was his increasing closeness to crypto-enthusiasts like Kennedy; his stated willingness to embrace crypto-friendly policy; and also, notably, his promise to release a now forty-year-old man from prison: Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht was pardoned last week, at the close of the second day of Trump’s Presidency, a day after Trump’s pardon of roughly fifteen hundred people involved in the January 6th insurrection. The delay had caused some of Ulbricht’s acolytes to worry. “People were posting in our chat, like, ‘O.K., there’s an hour and a half left of Day One . . . ’ ” Rich Clarke, the bitcoin meetup group’s organizer, who works in real estate, told me. “And a lot of my friends on Facebook were posting things like ‘Hope It Happens.’ ” He went on, “I think it was a shrewd move to pardon Ross sort of all on his own, after Trump did the mass pardons. It kind of gives the gesture more gravitas.”
In 2011, Ulbricht, an Eagle Scout from Austin, Texas, founded Silk Road, an online black market that existed until his arrest, in 2013, for crimes related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. According to authorities, more than a million transactions took place on Silk Road, out of the government’s regulatory reach, generating more than two hundred million dollars in revenue. Drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin made up a huge portion of the site’s sales, from which Ulbricht apparently took millions in commissions. Silk Road “lowered the barriers to drug dealing by enabling drug dealers to reach customers online they could have never met on the street,” a federal prosecutor said in a closing argument. (Prosecutors also presented evidence that Ulbricht was involved in a murders-for-hire plot, but the government admitted that there was no evidence that the alleged targets had been harmed, and charges were not pursued.) In 2015, Ulbricht, who went by the dark-Web sobriquet Dread Pirate Roberts—a reference to a shifting character in “The Princess Bride”—received two life sentences without the possibility of parole.
What made Ulbricht a crypto hero, ultimately, was that Silk Road had offered one of the first clear use cases for bitcoin: all transactions on the dark-Web site were made with the then nascent cryptocurrency, which, thanks to pseudonymous addresses at the disposal of buyer and seller, provided a significant degree of cover. Of course, this use case was, perhaps, not the ideal one for a new currency wishing to be seen as legitimate. “For better or for worse, the Silk Road did have a huge impact on bitcoin in its early days, in its public perception, in its adoption,” Clarke told me. “And Ross has, in the past, apologized because he’s not certain—nor am I—whether Silk Road was a net positive for bitcoin.”
But freeing Ulbricht remained a big issue for libertarians like Clarke, who, given their laissez-faire philosophy, embraced pro-crypto policy before most Republicans or Democrats. At the Libertarian Party’s national convention last year, Trump went onstage and announced that he
