American Kingpin: Mastermind Behind Silk Road (2017) Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton, "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road"
ISBN: 1591848148 | 2017 | EPUB | 352 pages | 18.03 MB


The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it

In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.

It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts