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Chapter 23<br />
ROSS, HANGED OR HOME<br />
Ross’s fingers throbbed as he typed. The red edges along the rims of his nails were nearly<br />
bleeding from his constant, savage biting. The problem was, he didn’t know how to stop<br />
himself. Anxiety would course through his body and the chewing would begin.<br />
It was a pattern that was developing and Ross had no idea how to end it. One minute the site<br />
would be expeditiously moving along, as smooth as water to a stone, and then out of nowhere<br />
—BOOM!—some sort of cataclysmic event would occur. Server crashes, hackers trying to break into<br />
the Bitcoin bank, bad code that needed replacing, good code that needed updating, conflicts between<br />
drug buyers and drug dealers, lost packages, scam artists, and stolen Bitcoins. While these issues<br />
were understandable given the nature of his work, they would come out of nowhere and Ross was<br />
forced to fix them immediately, no matter where he was.<br />
Sometimes these problems were easily resolvable (like plugging holes in the ship when hackers<br />
attacked). Other problems had been plaguing the site since it began (like finding where those holes<br />
were before the hackers found them). And yet occasionally, a problem arose that would cost Ross<br />
tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. For example, in a single day recently, he had found<br />
out, someone had managed to steal $75,000 in Bitcoins because of some second-rate programming<br />
Ross had written. Those were the days that he would begin incessantly biting his nails.<br />
Luckily for Ross, losing $75,000 wasn’t going to bankrupt him. He was now making so much<br />
money from the site that he was having trouble laundering it into physical cash. Back in December the<br />
Silk Road had been processing $500,000 in drug sales each month. Now, in late March, the site was<br />
doing $500,000 in sales a week. When Variety Jones looked at the growth charts, his response to the<br />
Dread Pirate Roberts was apropos: “Fuck me,” he wrote. “I mean, in my mind I knew it, but seeing<br />
the graph, well . . . fuck me!” The graph he was referring to was of a yellow line that illustrated<br />
growth and profits on the site and pointed straight upward to the right and all the way off the page.<br />
Variety Jones took a few minutes to do some math. His calculations predicted that, at the current<br />
growth rate, sales would be up to $1 million a week by April, just a month from now, and double that<br />
by midsummer. He told Ross that in the worst-case scenario 2012 would end up being a $100 million<br />
year for the site. And if things stayed on the current trajectory, by the end of 2013 the Silk Road<br />
would be processing nearly $1 billion a year in drug sales.
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