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at the University of Texas, and ask for help. Ross was careful not to tell Richard what he was actually
working on, but rather described his Web site as a “top secret” project. In a world where everyone
has a start-up idea that they consider “top secret,” Richard didn’t really question his old friend and
helped debug the PHP—the programming language—that Ross had tangled into a jumbled mess.
But all of that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that Ross Ulbricht was ready to launch his
new venture: the Silk Road.
There was, however, still one major question that gnawed at him. Would anyone use the site?
Even if you could make a store that didn’t have any laws or rules, would people actually want to shop
there?
If this became just another line on Ross Ulbricht’s résumé of failures, he would be destroyed. By
himself he had essentially done the work of a twelve-person start-up, acting as the front-end
programmer, back-end developer, database guy, Tor consultant, Bitcoin analyst, project manager,
guerrilla marketing strategist, CEO, and lead investor. Not to mention the in-house fungiculturist. It
would have cost more than a million dollars of people’s time to replicate the site. Plus thousands of
lines of PHP and MySQL code needed to connect to the Bitcoin blockchain—list of transactions—and
a dozen widgets and whatnots in between. If it failed, Ross didn’t know what he would do with
himself.
But something told him this time was different, that maybe, in some strange and cosmic way, this
site was why he was here, and he was going to do everything he could to see it reach its full potential.
To help people, to free them, through his Web site.
He had an entire plan for how he would let the world know about his new creation, all
anonymously. But first he had to tell one person—in person—about the site.
He wandered into the living room where Julia sat and announced it was time for a demonstration.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people of all ages, and of course Julia, please take your
seats. The presentation is about to begin. Ross informed Julia that the site was finally ready and he
wanted, so proudly, to show it to her. He began by asking for her silver MacBook. “So first,” Ross
said as he typed, “you will need to download Tor; remember, Tor is a Web browser which makes you
completely anonymous online, so that the thieves”—Ross’s term for the government—“can’t see what
you’re doing and searching for.”
“Good!” she declared. She was happy to download anything that protected her from the prying
eyes of the thieves. Down with the thieves! She clapped her hands together.
“Next you go to this URL,” he said as he typed one of the strangest Web site addresses Julia had
ever seen into this peculiar Tor Web browser: “tydgccykixpbu6uz.onion.” While it might have looked
like these letters were the result of a cat walking across his keyboard, Ross explained that this was
just part of the safety and anonymity of Tor.
As the site slowly loaded onto Julia’s computer screen, Ross smiled, turning the laptop back in
her direction. There, in all its splendid, anonymous glory, was the tiny world Ross had been working
on all this time. An anonymous marketplace where, as advertised on the page now staring back at
Julia, you could buy and sell anything, without fear of the government peering over your shoulder or
throwing you in a cage.
“Wow,” Julia said as she grabbed the laptop with both hands, “you did it, baby! So how do you
buy stuff?”