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enough, someone was.
You could buy any drug imaginable, he saw—by his count 343 different kinds of drugs, to be
precise. Black tar heroin, Afghan hash, some Sour 13 weed, and ecstasy. All for street prices; in some
instances less expensive than street. You simply traded some cash for Bitcoins, traded some Bitcoins
for drugs, and waited for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver your drugs.
Adrian was skeptical, though, that if the Silk Road was real, anyone would actually buy drugs on
the site. He registered an account on the forums under the username Adrian802 (802 was his area
code from Connecticut, where he had grown up). He then posted a query asking if anyone would mind
being anonymously interviewed for a story he was going to write about this defiant Web site.
He received some responses, then a man’s phone number, and while pacing on the sidewalk
outside Grumpy, he interviewed Mark, a software developer, about what it was like to buy drugs on
the Internet.
“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said over the phone, explaining that he’d ordered
ten tabs of LSD from someone in Canada, and four days later the mailman dropped the acid off at his
house.
Another person responded to Adrian’s query too: the person who apparently ran the Silk Road.
• • •
As the Silk Road had grown, Ross’s anxiety had expanded at an equal clip. When he had first posted
anonymous messages on forums less than five months earlier, he had been oblivious to just how
quickly it would drive people to the site. At first it was a trickle of customers, a few dozen here or
there, but since he had shut down Good Wagon Books, his drug Web site had rapidly grown.
Hundreds of people were now selling drugs on the site, and thousands were buying.
Ross was making money from his enterprise too. The mushrooms, most of which he had
offloaded, had turned into a hefty profit of tens of thousands of dollars.
All of this came with a mixture of exhilaration and fear, and Ross had been in a constant state of
worry, fretful that maybe Julia was right, that he could be tied to his creation. He constantly had to
reassure himself that no one would ever be able to connect him with the Silk Road.
That was, except for two people.
Weeks earlier, Ross had been left with no choice but to tell his old college buddy Richard that he
was the founder of the Amazon of drugs, as Richard had refused to help anymore without an
explanation. “Tell me about this or leave me out of it,” Richard wrote to Ross over chat. “I’m
officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you’re going to
reveal it.” Without Richard’s expertise, Ross was completely and utterly “fudged.” If the site went
down, Ross would be abandoned alone in a dark and complex maze. So he was left with no choice
but to come clean.
At first Richard was shocked. After Ross explained his thinking behind the site, Richard agreed
to continue to help. It didn’t hurt that Ross gave his old pal a few baggies of his specialty magic
mushrooms as a big thank-you. And that Richard started shopping on the site, buying ecstasy, weed,
Vicodin, and some prescription antibiotics. (Richard was a germophobe, so he relished the ability to
get medicine without a doctor’s note.) And finally, Richard was confident (given that he had helped
write the code) that nothing could be tied back to them.