What is Silk Road?
What if you stop someone from doing something? They would probably understand; if not, they will figure out other ways of doing it through unethical means. One such shady example was the Silk Road.
Silk Road was a darknet founded by Ross William Ulbricht in 2011. It was an online black market where buyers and sellers could transact illegal goods anonymously through Bitcoin. It was operated through the Tor network to exclude traffic monitoring. There were more than 10,000 products listed by 2013 when the government discovered it and decided to shut it down. Ross William Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment. Major drugs were exchanged through the Silk Road along with a portion of some legal products like jewellery, clothing, books and cigarettes. The website has limitations to child pornography, credit card fraud and weapons, which means people were not allowed to sell or exchange these products on the website.
What is the connection between Bitcoin and Silk Road?
Since Silk Road induces anonymity of the transactions, the transactions were paid in Bitcoin, or we can say the currency of the Silk Road was Bitcoin. In 2012, over 50,000 Bitcoin got stolen in the hack of the now demised Silk Road, which the U.S. government later seized in November 2021.
