The US government took a thumb in the eye with the creation of the Silk Road website. Right there on the internet you could anonymously buy drugs and various other contraband, and for a couple years no one could do a darn thing about it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What is Silk Road and why is it significant?
Okay.
So drug laws specifically are illegitimate and terrible to libertarians because you're taking the drugs for yourself and that's your choice, right? It's a personal choice. So that really kind of explains a lot why he was like an illicit drug website. It was a thumb in the eye to the drug laws that he and other libertarians feel were illegitimate. All right. I'm glad I asked.
Yeah, I'm glad you asked, too, because I really wanted to get that off my chest.
So Silk Road grew. He started it was not just a one person operation. It was too big for that. So he needed some employees. These people all went by these kind of fun little nicknames, including Variety Jones and Inigo. Oh, also from Princess Bride.
Yeah.
Didn't notice that. Libertas Smed. And then another one, chronic pain, one word. The first C is capitalized. And that person's name was Curtis Green, and he was the first person that would be arrested in the Silk Road operation. And so you'll just sort of put a pin in that guy.
Yes, for sure. So he gets the website launched in 2011, around the beginning of 2011. And to get things kicked off, he started growing psilocybin mushrooms so that there was something somebody was selling on Silk Road. And pretty soon, other people were like, wait, you're really doing this? Like, this is for real? I want to make money selling drugs online. And it just kind of took off from there.
Again, without cryptocurrency, there just wouldn't have been a Silk Road. And this is actually pointed to by some people as like an early proving ground that showed like, yep, Bitcoin works. It does exactly what it says it can do. And it could completely revolutionize the global economy. This was the first chance for it to really kind of show it stuff. And it really did because it worked.
And one of the other reasons it worked too is because Ross Ulbricht was honest. He hand, I guess, hand transacted every transaction between seller and buyer on the site for a while. And at that point, he would hold the money in escrow. And then when the whole thing was, when the deal was done and everybody was satisfied, he would release the money to the seller.
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