34856893457934

Another man talked about his experience being hit by a roadside bomb while serving in Afghanistan.
And other stories were more uplifting, like the couple who fell in love during Hurricane Katrina.
It might not have been the wisest thing for Ross to draw attention to himself. But if on the Silk
Road the Dread Pirate Roberts got to speak the truth about society all the time, why shouldn’t Ross be
able to do the same thing in this world? No one would ever be the wiser that the man about to speak
into the microphone was actually two men.
Ross and René were instructed to talk to someone who might listen to their conversation two
hundred years in the future. They began discussing how they had ended up in San Francisco. René had
come for the “start-ups and the money,” he said. Then it was Ross’s turn to tell the story of how he
had ended up inside this metal box.
“I was living in Austin, Texas,” Ross said, and then he trailed off, as if he were traveling back
there in his mind. “And, ehm,” Ross continued, stuttering slightly as he stared off into the distance.
“And, ehm,” he said again.
René looked back, waiting for his friend to finish the sentence, seemingly oblivious to where
Ross’s mind had just wandered off to.
As close as Ross had gotten to René, he kept the promise he had made to himself a year earlier.
He would never tell anyone else in the real world about the online world he had created. He had
learned that bitter lesson with Julia.
It had been difficult hiding the truth. Friends in the real world would say things to him like “Why
don’t you try this business idea or work on that app?” to which Ross would simply say, “Good idea,
dude. I’ll think about it.” But, as he told his employees on the site, he just wanted to “scream at them,
‘Because I’m running a goddam multi-million dollar criminal enterprise!!!!’”
Lying came at a price. To separate those two worlds, and to justify the actions he had to make in
each—telling stories to his family and friends in one and making resolute decisions with vast
repercussions in the other—the man in the pink-and-green-checkered shirt had become incredibly
adept at separating the life of Ross Ulbricht from that of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
As Ross he would go on these walkabouts with his friends (or alone), and the biggest decisions
he had to make each day were where the adventure would begin and what he would eat for lunch.
When he stepped into the role of the Dread Pirate Roberts, he hid Ross away, and DPR reveled in the
power that came with dictating the rules of a world in which hundreds of thousands of people
roamed. He was the one who decided who got to stay on his island and what they could and could not
do while they were there. And DPR, while seemingly the same person as the sweet Ross his mother
had raised, was able to make tough decisions that a younger self would have cowered away from.
This had happened just two weeks earlier, when DPR had been faced with a query on the site
that no one had ever posed to Ross in his debate clubs back at Penn State.
“Question for you,” one of his employees had asked at the time. “Do we allow selling kidneys
and livers?”
Well, that was something Ross had never imagined people might want to hawk on the Silk Road.
“Is it listed?” he replied. “Or someone wants to sell?”
The employee then forwarded an e-mail that had come into the Silk Road’s support page from
someone who said they wanted to sell kidneys, livers, and other body parts; according to the
anonymous sender, the sales of these internal organs would “all be consensual” between the sellers
and the buyers.