The Long and Winding Story of Silk Road, Bitcoin’s Earliest Major Application
This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine‘s 10th anniversary print edition. Silk Road, the online marketplace named for the historic network of trade routes established during the Han Dynasty, went live in February 2011. Its domain was accessible only on the so-called “dark web” via the encrypted and anonymous network software Tor. This eBay for the internet’s underworld was the first of its kind: a clandestine marketplace for the buying and selling of (mostly) illicit substances with bitcoin. It put bitcoin in the hands of countless new users, demonstrated firsthand....
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The FBI shut down black marketplace Silk Road a year ago. This hidden website was used for the sale and purchase of items and services such as drugs, weapons, fake passports and other forged documents. To refresh your memory of the full Silk Road story, check out our interactive timeline below: This article is part of CoinDesk's Silk Road: One Year On series. Keep checking back for new additions to the series. Road. Silk RoadTimelines
The latest reincarnation of the deep web marketplace, in the form of Silk Road 3.0 is started by the people behind Crypto Market. Will they be able to live up to the expectations? Silk Road is reincarnated for the fourth time. The deep web marketplace is back online after its predecessors were forcibly shut down by the law enforcement agencies resulting in the creator’s arrest and incarceration. Silk Road used to be a network of trade routes traversing through the whole of Asian continent to connect with the Mediterranean Sea. It originally got its name for being the route taken by the....
The story of Silk Road and its creator Ross Ulbricht are inextricably linked to bitcoin’s history. In February 2011, the dark web black market was one of the first web stores to go bitcoin-only, providing an undeniable use case for the bitcoin network as a payment rail. On the other hand, the Silk Road stained […]
The latest chapter of the story of Silk Road began unfolding today with the arrest of Charlie Shrem, the founder of the BitInstant bitcoin exchange, on money laundering charges involving the black marketplace. Shrem and 'BTCKing' are accused, by the Manhattan US Attorney, the DEA and other federal agencies, of engaging in a "scheme to sell" $1m of bitcoin to Silk Road users. Ross William Ulbricht, the 29-year-old alleged mastermind behind the Road, has not yet been tried. He was arrested for violating the narcotics laws of the United States, possessing and distributing controlled....
There's been quite a few films related to bitcoin, and here's another. Freshly announced: EPIX has announced that the original documentary Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and Silk Road is expected to make a world premiere on the premium network in 2015. The film, as the name would suggest, tells the story of websites hidden on the so-called Deep Web. These pages are non-indexed intentionally, and account for 96 percent of the world wide web, as it were. In particular, the film focuses on Silk Road, an illicit marketplace where users can purchase illegal products: narcotics, firearms,....