President Donald Trump continued his wave of pardons on Tuesday, Jan. 21, following through on a campaign promise. The president pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted of drug trafficking and money laundering in 2015.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” the president wrote on Truth Social Tuesday evening. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
Libertarians latched on to the freedom cry for Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for crimes connected to the Silk Road.
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What is Silk Road?
Silk Road came about in the early days of the dark web. It was a website hosted through the Tor Browser, which is “designed to prevent websites from fingerprinting or identifying you based on your browser configuration.” In simpler terms, Tor lets users surf the web without revealing who or where they are.
Silk Road was named after the ancient trade route linking China with the West. But this modern iteration was an online black market, used to sell and buy illicit items, including hard drugs, like heroin and cocaine. Vendors could also sell hacking equipment and stolen passports. The site used Bitcoin to complete hard-to-trace transactions.
The original site, which was shut down in 2013, had just under 1 million registered users, according to the FBI.
Counting the Bitcoin
According to the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, over roughly two years, “The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins.”
At the time, the cryptocurrency was worth considerably less than it is today. Bitcoin traded at $94.50 in 2013. That would put revenue from sales just shy of $900 million, and Silk Road commissions over $58 million.
Today, Bitcoin is worth more than $103,000. That amount of Bitcoin revenue would have approached $1 trillion, and Silk Road’s commission would be $63 billion.
In 2013, the FBI seized 173,991 Bitcoin linked to the Silk Road case. At the time, it was worth $33.6 million. If the FBI held onto it, the seized Bitcoin is worth more than $18 billion today.
Pardoning founder Ross Ulbricht
Trump promised he would pardon Ulbricht during an address to the Libertarian National Convention in May.
“If you vote for me, on day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbrich to a sentence of time served,” he said at the event in Washington. “He’s already served 11 years, we’re going to get them home.”
“Ross Ulbricht has been a libertarian political prisoner for more than a decade. I’m proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and that has finally paid off,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle said in a statement.
Ulbricht went by the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to the main character of the classic 1987 film, “The Princess Bride.”
Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco in 2013 as part of an elaborate sting operation. He was later found guilty of drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. The government said he also solicited six murder-for-hire schemes, including one against a former Silk Road employee.
Despite running a site on the dark web, he apparently wasn’t that skilled at hiding his own identity.
The FBI says he touted running the underground marketplace on LinkedIn, tried to hire a contract killer who turned out to be a cop, and even tried to troubleshoot some coding problems with the site using his real name.
Ulbricht was sentenced to life in federal prison in 2015. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $183 million.
“Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people,” then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said at the time.
