34856893457934

A few days before he left for Australia, his bags packed, his passport and laptop ready to go,
Ross went over to his friend Richard Bates’s house and knocked on his door. Richard had all but
stopped helping Ross with the programming problems on the Silk Road, fearing the site was growing
too big and terrified by the attention it was receiving in the press. But he was still the only person
besides Julia who knew the true identity of the site’s creator. Ross had to fix that before anyone else
found out.
It was early evening on November 11, 2011, and for weeks nerdy Richard had been planning a
party to celebrate the mathematical anomaly of 11/11/11, when the day, the month, and the year all
lined up to create a string of elevens. Ross showed up before the festivities began, knocking on
Richard’s door with a somewhat panicked rattle.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Ross declared. They both wandered inside Richard’s
stark white, almost medically clean apartment, marred only by a few decorations for that night’s
festivities. “Have you told anybody about—you know—about my involvement in the Silk Road?”
Richard spoke in his usual timid whisper, explaining nervously that he had almost told someone
but then hadn’t, so in short, no. No one else knew.
Ross expanded on his question, telling Richard that someone had posted a message on Facebook
about Ross running a drug Web site that the authorities would surely like to know about.
Hearing this, Richard felt that familiar wave of fear shroud him. Surely he was an accomplice to
Ross, having helped him build the site and knowing who ran it. Frail Richard could go to jail for the
rest of his life, as could Ross. And if there was one thing Richard was definitely not built for, it was
life behind bars. “You’ve got to shut the site down,” Richard pleaded. “This is not worth going to
prison over.”
Ross had anticipated this response. “I can’t shut the site down,” he replied.
“Why?”
“Because,” Ross solemnly said to his friend, “I gave the site to someone else.”