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Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market.

It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts". As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 bitcoins. In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down the Silk Road website and arrested Ulbricht. Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by other administrators of the former site, but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was given two life sentences without possibility of parole.

Due, in part, to off-duty research conducted by IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent Gary Alford, Ross Ulbricht was alleged by the FBI to be the founder and owner of Silk Road and the person behind the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR). The FBI initially seized 26,000 bitcoins from accounts on Silk Road, worth approximately $3.6 million at the time. In late March 2015, a criminal complaint issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California led to the arrest of two former federal agents who had worked undercover in the Baltimore Silk Road investigation of Ulbricht, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Mark Force IV and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges.

In February 2013, an Australian cocaine and MDMA ("ecstasy") dealer became the first person to be convicted of crimes directly related to Silk Road, after authorities intercepted drugs that he was importing through the mail, searched his premises, and discovered his Silk Road alias in an image file on his personal computer. There have been over 130 other arrests connected with Silk Road, although some of these arrests may not be directly related to Silk Road, and may not be public information for legal reasons.

When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud". Only users of Tor could access the Silk Road.

The complaint published when Ulbricht was arrested included information the FBI gained from a system image of the Silk Road server collected on 23 July 2013.

The Farmer's Market was a Tor site similar to Silk Road, but which did not use bitcoins. Other sites already existed when Silk Road was shut down and The Guardian predicted that these would take over the market that Silk Road previously dominated.

On 6 November 2013, administrators from the closed Silk Road relaunched the site, led by a new pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, and dubbed it "Silk Road 2.0." It recreated the original site's setup and promised improved security. On 20 December 2013, it was announced that three alleged Silk Road 2.0 administrators had been arrested; two of these suspects, Andrew Michael Jones and Gary Davis, were named as the administrators "Inigo" and "Libertas" who had continued their work on Silk Road 2.0.

Following the closure of Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014, Diabolus Market renamed itself to 'Silk Road 3 Reloaded' in order to capitalize on the brand. In January 2015, Silk Road Reloaded launched on I2P with multiple cryptocurrency support and similar listing restrictions to the original Silk Road market.

"Ross Ulbricht, the Creator and Owner of the Silk Road Website, Found Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court on All Counts — FBI". www.fbi.gov.

Quick Facts

• In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down the Silk Road website and arrested Ulbricht.
• In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was given two life sentences without possibility of parole.
• On 6 November 2013, administrators from the closed Silk Road relaunched the site, led by a new pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, and dubbed it "Silk Road 2.0." It recreated the original site's setup and promised improved security.
• Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by other administrators of the former site, but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous.
• Following the closure of Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014, Diabolus Market renamed itself to 'Silk Road 3 Reloaded' in order to capitalize on the brand.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Silk Road (marketplace)". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.