In American Kingpin, the Silk Road ends in a farce
Few startup founders over the past decade have inspired as much mythology as Ross Ulbricht. In October 2013, the FBI arrested Ulbricht as he sat working inside a San Francisco branch library. When they grabbed his open laptop, they found what they had been seeking for more than two years: evidence that Ulbricht, a 29-year-old Texas-born Eagle Scout, was the mastermind behind a fast-growing dark web black market called the Silk Road.
To friends and family, Ulbricht was a good-natured if frustrated entrepreneur who liked to spend his free time discussing libertarian politics. To the FBI, he was the Dread Pirate Roberts — the man responsible for building an anonymous marketplace for selling drugs and firearms that was processing millions of…
