Since 2011, the Silk Road has infuriated governments the world over by allowing digital pirates to operate above the law. It has been – in effect – an eBay for Afghani heroin, cocaine and all manner of illegal goods. Hosted in the virtual tunnels of the ‘Deep Web’, transactions are made in BitCoin and up until yesterday, it was doing roughly 60,000 a day. But now, it seems, the cops have swooped. Yesterday afternoon Ross William Ulbricht, known by the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ was arrested – on charge of being the owner.
Drugs were the site’s bread and butter, making up 70 percent of sales. But you could buy all manner of items including art, erotica and jewellery; banned copies of 18th century literature occasionally circulated. There were limits though: terms of service prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to ‘harm or defraud’ – amongst the list of items banned were child pornography, assassinations and weapons of mass destruction.
But it was the trade in drugs that fuelled the site’s success: between February 2011 and July 2013, there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed – the value of these estimated to be around $1.2
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