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unbelievably exciting one! Ross was no longer the only person selling drugs on the Silk Road. A
couple of other dealers had surfaced, hawking weed, cocaine, and small quantities of ecstasy.
When he told Julia about this development, she showed signs of worry. It was one thing to sell a
few joints and little baggies of magic mushrooms on the Internet, she warned, but harder drugs could
come with larger consequences. Ross argued that the system he had built was completely anonymous
and safe and could never be tied back to him.
Assuring Julia that everyone was safe wasn’t his only challenge; he had to convince new buyers
too. To help entice potential customers to feel comfortable acquiring drugs from these mysterious new
dealers on the Internet, Ross built a ratings system on the Silk Road where sellers were given
“karma” points, which acted like positive or negative reviews, just as on eBay or Amazon.
While he was exhausted by all this work, he was also elated that people were finally using
something he had built. And by March 2011 he had already made a few thousand dollars in revenue.
Now his biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to manage his time between his drug Web
site, his book business, and Julia.
As luck would have it, one of those three things was about to vanish into a plume of dust. As he
worked away on his laptop amid the empty silence of his office, he was momentarily interrupted by a
ferocious BOOM! that erupted from inside the warehouse. It was so loud and terrifying that he
stopped breathing for a moment as more bangs detonated inside the space.
His mind spun in a nanosecond with all the possibilities of what was happening. Maybe it was a
raid by the police, a battering ram slamming through the door to stop the creator of the tiny Silk Road.
Maybe it was a gas line explosion. Ross stood there panicked for a moment, fearing that all those
hours of coding and mushroom farming had been in vain and that he was destined to be the
underachieving failure that he dreaded.
Then, as soon as the thunderous claps arrived, they were gone. And in their place there was
nothing but stark silence.
Ross’s heartbeat started to slow slightly as he built up the courage to carefully walk around the
corner into the warehouse to see what the noise had been.
There he saw that, one by one, like giant dominoes, the bookshelves of Good Wagon Books,
which weighed thousands of pounds, had toppled. What he had heard was the sound of snapping
wood and a mountain of books piling atop one another. It looked like a giant hand had reached in from
the roof and swirled the room around.
He surveyed the damage. The mystery novels lay on top of the computer-programming books.
The science fiction and romance section of Good Wagon Books was crushed beneath everything. It
quickly dawned on Ross that when he had built the bookshelves, with his mind clearly preoccupied
by the Silk Road, he must have forgotten to tighten several screws. The result of those actions could
have killed him.
He quickly rushed back into his office to call Julia and tell her the story. But as he told her about
the noises and the mess, Ross also realized that the books falling was not actually an inauspicious
event that would cause him more stress and turmoil. This was serendipitous. Maybe it was a sign
from God, fate, or sheer luck. But it meant that Ross now had an excuse to shut down the book
business and let his part-time employees go. He could tell everyone that rebuilding the shelves and
reorganizing the books would just be too laborious. He could do all of this without seeming like he
was giving up.