Silk Road Founder Marks 10 Years of Prison Sentence
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the first online “modern darknet market,” has now served 10 years out of his double life sentence in prison.
Ulbricht posted on X on October 2 that he had spent a decade in prison and feared he would spend the rest of his life “behind concrete walls and locked doors.” He stated that now all he can do is “pray for mercy.”
Ulbricht launched Silk Road in 2011 and operated it from his laptop using the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts.” It is the first modern darknet market with a Bitcoin-based payment system.
However, on October 1, 2023, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) impounded the laptop.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in U.S. federal court on multiple offenses related to the Silk Road's operations. He was given two life sentences plus forty years with no chance of parole.
The Silk Road website facilitated transactions totaling 9,519,664 Bitcoins between February 2011 and July 2013 and collected a commission of 600,000 Bitcoins, according to court documents for the case.
When the court documents were published, this equated to approximately $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions.
Many have echoed pleas for the website's founder to be granted amnesty, as Ulbricht's case has attracted widespread attention.
According to a website advocating for Ulbricht's release, over 250 organizations and 500,000 individuals have signed an online petition supporting his release. He has also received significant support from the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin communities.
One user went so far as to call Ulbricht a “Bitcoin political prisoner” and asserted that Bitcoin users will never forget him.
While there is a strong tide of support for Ulbricht, and many internet users have agreed that the punishments given to the founder of the Silk Road were unjust, others have a different opinion.
One X user pointed out that the prosecution in Ulbricht's case alleged that he hired hitmen to kill multiple people, although this was never formally charged against Ulbricht and remains a claim.
Another user described what actually occurred on the Silk Road website, including sex trafficking and drug dealing, and how it was used by “terrible people to do this kind of stuff.”
Online debates persist as defenders of Ulbricht point to modern social media platforms such as X and Facebook, stating, “All of these things also occur on [X]. And all other social networking sites.”
The leading website devoted to Ross's release has posted the sentences handed down to other Silk Road participants, stating that the average sentence is approximately six years. The top drug dealer on the website received only seven years in prison and is presently free.
In addition, the Silk Road 2.0 creators have either served no time or up to 6.5 years and are now free.
