American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

by Nick Bilton

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Crime & Justice

The story of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road darknet marketplace — its libertarian-utopian founding, its multi-million-dollar drug-marketplace reality, and the multi-agency federal effort that brought it down.

Core ideas
  • The Silk Road was built on a sincere ideological premise (free markets in everything, including drugs, harm-reducing) that decayed under the actual operating realities — including alleged murders-for-hire.
  • Two of the federal agents on the case turned out to be stealing Bitcoin from the site — the takedown is half cop story, half corruption story.
  • Bitcoin's first sustained mainstream use case was illegal commerce; that history shapes everything about how crypto culture and regulators see each other.
Published2017
Pages328
ISBN9781591848141
ReadDec 2022
true crime, cryptocurrency, dark web

Connected to 5 other books

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