Silk Road was an online black market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs. Ulbricht was convicted of running an underground online drug bazaar.
The site, which operated for more than two years, facilitated millions of dollars in transactions between buyers and sellers, who hawked illegal goods ranging from cocaine to fake driver’s licenses. The site operated on a hidden part of the Internet called the Tor network, and its only accepted form of payment was bitcoin, a digital currency that is difficult to trace. The FBI initially seized 26,000 bitcoins, worth approximately $3.6 million at the time, from accounts on Silk Road.
The judge gave Mr. Ulbricht the harshest punishment allowed under the law, saying Silk Road was “an assault on the public health of our communities” by making it easy for people around the world to buy illegal drugs. The punishment is a heavy price to pay for the 31-year-old. After a three-week trial in New York City, Mr. Ulbricht was found guilty in February of seven criminal charges, including conspiracies to sell drugs, launder money and hack computers.
Last year’s FBI’s takedown of that narcotics smorgasbord opened the underground trade to competitors. The online bazaar for contraband known as “Agora” now has more product listings than any other online black market.
sources: wikipedia, wsj.com, wired.com, cnn.com