Ross Ulbricht

Ross William Ulbricht (born March 27, 1984) is an American serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013.

The site operated as a hidden service on the Tor network and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal products and services.

Ulbricht ran the site under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", after the fictional character from The Princess Bride.

He attended West Ridge Middle School and Westlake High School both near Austin, graduating from high school in 2002.

Ulbricht attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics.

Ulbricht received an additional scholarship to attend Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography.

By the time Ulbricht graduated, he had become interested in libertarian economic theory and adhered to the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, supported Ron Paul, promoted agorism and participated in college debates to discuss his economic views.

Ulbricht graduated from Penn State in 2009 and returned to Austin.

He tried day trading and started a video game company but both ventures failed.

He eventually partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used book seller, Good Wagon Books.

Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to Dallas, leaving Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself.

Around this time, Ulbricht began planning Silk Road (initially called Underground Brokers).

In his personal diary, he outlined his idea for a website "where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them."

Ulbricht's ex-girlfriend said, "I remember when he had the idea ... He said something about ... the Silk Road in Asia ... and what a big network it was ... And that's what he wanted to create, so he thought it was the perfect name."

Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road on his public LinkedIn page, where he discussed his wish to "use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind" and claimed, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Silk Road ran as an onion service on the Tor network, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination Internet Protocol addresses.

By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ulbricht could conceal the server's IP address and thus its location.

Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was used for transactions on the site.

While all bitcoin transactions were recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain, users who avoided linking their legal names to their cryptocurrency wallets were able to conduct transactions with considerable anonymity.

Ulbricht used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" username for Silk Road, although it is disputed whether only he used that account.

He attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Law enforcement broke Silk Road's cover in a number of ways.

A drug agency investigator infiltrated the site and became an admin, thereby gaining inside information about the site operations, and finding Ulbricht's chats showed Pacific time, narrowing down his likely location.

Law enforcement seized a Silk Road server in Iceland and gained a trove of chat logs, further enriching their knowledge.

In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Ulbricht and Silk Road was taken offline.

Ulbricht was connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an Internal Revenue Service investigator working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013.

The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name.

On October 1, 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library and accused him of being the "mastermind" behind the site.

To prevent Ulbricht from encrypting or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be quarreling lovers.

When they had sufficiently distracted him, according to Joshuah Bearman of Wired, they quickly moved in to arrest him while a third agent grabbed the laptop and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan.

Kiernan then inserted a flash drive into one of the laptop's USB ports, with software that copied key files.

Ulbricht was ordered held without bail.

On February 4, 2014, Ulbricht was charged with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.

On August 21, 2014, a superseding indictment added three additional charges.

In 2015, he was convicted of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the internet, conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.

He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Ulbricht's appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2017 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 were unsuccessful.

He is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson.

Ulbricht grew up in Austin, Texas.

He was a Boy Scout, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout.