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“Look,” Ross said, leaning against the back of the bed as he replayed the clip for Julia. “They’ve
painted a bull’s-eye on my back.”
“Ross,” Julia said, petrified as she watched, “this isn’t good.”
The attention of the U.S. Senate was the last thing he needed at this moment. In a month, or six,
maybe he could handle it. But not now.
Over the past few days, since the Gawker article had been published, an unremitting avalanche
of press had followed in its wake. Ross’s Web site had transformed from almost invisible to
mainstream as it entered the national news cycle with shocking velocity. Established media brands
were all over the story. The Atlantic picked it up; NPR talked about it on air; and TV news outlets,
including ABC and NBC, produced segments devoted to it (“They call it the Amazon of drugs . . .”).
Not to mention the hundreds of blog posts, discussions on drug forums and social media, and articles
on libertarian Web sites.
Despite the mainstream press, most people who read about the site still didn’t believe you could
actually buy drugs on the Internet and have them mailed to your home. This had to be one of those
Nigerian e-mail scams or a place for law enforcement to lure unsuspecting idiots who were going to
be swept up in a massive online drug bust. But still, idiots or not, thousands of people downloaded
Tor and signed up for the Silk Road to see. It couldn’t hurt to look, right?
Ross watched with a mixture of dread and delight as his databases filled up and the site slowed
down. He barely slept a wink the night after the article was published, lying awake staring at his
laptop or sitting in his ergonomic chair in the bedroom, watching sign-ups from all over the world.
The day after the Gawker article, Ross got up, groggy and on edge, and was greeted by a total
catastrophe. No, the site hadn’t been shut down by law enforcement. Or knocked off-line by hackers.
Nothing like that. It was much worse.
While some people had simply come to the Silk Road to window-shop, others were actually
buying and selling drugs. And every time someone purchased something, some of Ross’s Bitcoins
vanished in the transaction. What the hell is going on? There must be a bug in the code. His
personal profits, which were now in the double-digit thousands of dollars, were literally dwindling
by hundreds of dollars every few hours. Ross had to figure out how to fix a problem he hadn’t even
known existed.
It was sickening.
After digging through his code for hours trying to find the error, Ross realized he had originally
built the Silk Road using a standard piece of code called “bitcoind,” which connected his payment
system. Now he was discovering that he had created that interface improperly. He just had no idea
where the mistake was in his code. All he knew was that he had essentially built a cash register
where money fell out of the bottom into the ether whenever he opened it. And right now, as slews of
new customers came to the site, that register was opening and closing at a staggering rate.
When he did the math, at the speed with which people were buying drugs on the site, the Silk
Road was fast approaching insolvency. He would soon be the first person in history to start an
underground drug Web site on the Internet and the first person in history to see it go bankrupt because
he had written so much shitty code.
Ross had no choice but to start with the problems he could manage. He made the painful decision
to shut off new user sign-ups to the Silk Road, which would help the servers handle the onslaught of
visitors, albeit slightly. Next up was figuring out why his money was disappearing with every