Ross Ulbricht

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pages: 349 words: 109,304

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

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

“What are you talking about?” “It’s him. Ross Ulbricht,” Gary said. “You really think you’re going to find him from a Google search?” Gary’s coworker said. Gary had suspected that Ross Ulbricht might be in some way involved with the Silk Road and had mentioned it to his coworkers months earlier, but the lead had gone nowhere. They couldn’t pursue a case against someone based on the mere fact that they had posted about the Silk Road on the Internet. But after Gary had seen the IP address from a café in San Francisco on the wall at the FBI office, the city where this Ross Ulbricht character apparently lived, he had become convinced that he was at least involved, if not actually the Dread Pirate Roberts.

“And then I found a question posted on Stack Overflow, where a user by the name of Ross Ulbricht had asked about coding help with Tor. You know?” Gary said. “And then, a minute after he had posted the question on Stack Overflow, he went in and changed his username from Ross Ulbricht to Frosty, and then—” “What did you say?” Tarbell interrupted, sitting up in his bed. Gary was caught off guard by the question but answered anyway. “Stack Overflow. It’s a site where you can post programming questions—” “No, not that,” Tarbell said, his tone coming across as aggressive. “What did you say after that?” Gary explained that Ross Ulbricht had signed up for an account on Stack Overflow with his real e-mail as his username, but a minute after asking a question on the site, he had changed the username to Frosty.

By Monday morning he had come up with a scheme that he hoped his boss would not be able to ignore. He took a deep breath, walked into his supervisor’s office, and sat down. “You got a minute?” he said as he threw the white envelope on the desk. “I have something important I need to show you.” Five Years Earlier Chapter 2 ROSS ULBRICHT Ross, jump off a cliff.” Ross Ulbricht stood there with a slightly dumbfounded look on his face as he peered over the edge of the bluff. Below him, Austin’s Pace Bend Lake curled into and around itself, leaving a forty-five-foot drop into the frigid water below. “What?” Ross said with a goofy smile as he lifted his hands and pointed to his wide chest.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

Just months earlier, the FBI, IRS, and DHS had finally, after a two-and-a-half-year hunt, identified the site’s founder as a twenty-nine-year-old Texan with no criminal record, a man by the name of Ross Ulbricht. Agents had swarmed into the science fiction section of a San Francisco library, arrested Ulbricht where he sat running his vast drug empire, grabbed his laptop, and shut down the Silk Road for good. Stories of the landmark dark web case still reverberated through the law enforcement community. Gambaryan, based in the IRS’s Oakland office—just a few miles away, it turned out, from Ross Ulbricht’s home—had been asked only to interview a few witnesses in the aftermath of Ulbricht’s arrest.

I rode an elevator to the fifteenth floor and stepped into a stately courtroom with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge out the window behind the judge’s bench. A few minutes later, a slim, square-jawed thirty-year-old entered that courtroom, accompanied by his team of lawyers. Ross Ulbricht, wearing a gray suit, looked over the crowded gallery and flashed a smile to his mother. His trial was about to begin. In the defense’s opening statement, Ulbricht’s lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, began with a shocking admission: Yes, Ross Ulbricht had created the Silk Road. But then Dratel, a renowned national security lawyer, launched into the rest of the defense’s version of events: The young, idealistic Ulbricht had intended his marketplace to be only a kind of harmless “economic experiment.”

Just a year after Silk Road 2 appeared, in November 2014, the FBI and Europol had launched a major takedown known as Operation Onymous, exploiting a rare security vulnerability in Tor—and likely intelligence gleaned from Ross Ulbricht’s laptop about Silk Road moderators who had joined Silk Road 2—to arrest several of Silk Road 2’s staff and rip half a dozen of the marketplaces off-line. After that culling of the dark web market herd, however, another site had risen to prominence, this one called Evolution. It sold not only drugs but the sort of hacked data and stolen credit card numbers that Ross Ulbricht had deemed too unethical to allow on his site. When Evolution’s administrators disappeared in March 2015, absconding with the millions of dollars held in users’ escrow accounts, another market called Agora simply absorbed its users and took over the top spot in the dark web’s criminal economy.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

The other is at http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road. Many of the details in the book came from the Silk Road’s forums and Ross Ulbricht’s trial, which will be referred to in the notes by the following abbreviations: SRF: Silk Road forum archives, http://antilop.cc/sr/download/stexo_sr_forum.zip. RUTT: Ross Ulbricht trial transcripts, United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. United States District Court Southern District of New York. 14 CR 68 (KBF). RUTE: Ross Ulbricht trial exhibits, United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. United States District Court Southern District of New York. 14 CR 68 (KBF).

CHAPTER 22 218federal prosecutors arrested the operators of Liberty Reserve: Information on the arrest is available at http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/press releases/May13/LibertyReservePR.php. 218the top financial regulator in California sent the Bitcoin Foundation: The letter was posted by the executive director of the foundation at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/06/23/bitcoin-foundation-receives-cease-and-desist-order-from-california/. 224announced a few days after Charlie shut down BitInstant: Erik Voorhees to BTCF, July 17, 2013. 225one-millionth registered account: Eileen Ormsby, Silk Road (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2014). 225commissions collected by the site often approached over $10,000 a day: RUTE GX 250. 225Ross agreed to pay $100,000 up front: RUTE GX 241. 226“Don’t want to be a pain here”: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 226paid for with 3,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $500,000: Letter opposing Ross Ulbricht’s release on bail, filed by Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, November 20, 2013. These alleged murders and the chats between Ross and redandwhite were discussed during Ross Ulbricht’s trial, but Ross was not charged with any counts of murder for hire and Canadian police never found any evidence of any suspicious deaths during this time that might be tied to Ross. 227He moved out of his friend’s apartment in June: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 227“encrypt and backup important files”: Letter opposing Ross Ulbricht’s release on bail, filed by Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, November 20, 2013. 228“Without going into details, the stress of being”: Dread Pirate Roberts to Silk Road forum, September 20, 2013. 228Ross assigned Variety Jones: RUTE GX 241. 228When agents knocked on the door: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 229Ross changed apartments: Thomas Kiernan, RUTT, January 22, 2013.

These alleged murders and the chats between Ross and redandwhite were discussed during Ross Ulbricht’s trial, but Ross was not charged with any counts of murder for hire and Canadian police never found any evidence of any suspicious deaths during this time that might be tied to Ross. 227He moved out of his friend’s apartment in June: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 227“encrypt and backup important files”: Letter opposing Ross Ulbricht’s release on bail, filed by Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, November 20, 2013. 228“Without going into details, the stress of being”: Dread Pirate Roberts to Silk Road forum, September 20, 2013. 228Ross assigned Variety Jones: RUTE GX 241. 228When agents knocked on the door: Sealed complaint against Ross Ulbricht filed by FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell, September 27, 2013. 229Ross changed apartments: Thomas Kiernan, RUTT, January 22, 2013.


pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

The authorities chasing him could make a thousand mistakes but he only had to make one tiny slip up and it could be his downfall. I am really interested to see what happens next! Interests: trading, economics, physics, virtual worlds, liberty. – Ross Ulbricht’s LinkedIn profile Meet Ross Ulbricht At his bail hearing in November 2013, Ross Ulbricht’s lawyers submitted a total of sixty-three letters from family, friends and others attesting to his character and integrity. They described his reputation for charity and generosity and praised his gentle and peace-loving nature. Bail was denied, however, when the authorities countered with four more murder-for-hire charges to add to the two that had already been laid.

They had also noted a March 2013 question on technical website Stack Overflow about connecting to a hidden Tor site using computer language Curl, suggesting someone who was programming a hidden site. A minute after posting the question the user changed their name from ‘Ross Ulbricht’ to ‘frosty’. And they’d had undercover agents on the inside for over a year. Ulbricht, who had an advanced degree in chemical engineering and who had allegedly developed a cult-like following among the Silk Road users as Dread Pirate Roberts, a supposed criminal mastermind, was apparently caught in a public place logged into every incriminating site he had access to. This was the same Ross Ulbricht who had been visited by Homeland Security in July 2013 in relation to the package containing multiple counterfeit identification documents all bearing his photo.

To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force. – Ross Ulbricht’s LinkedIn profile An administrator of the Silk Road website, Curtis Green, a/k/a ‘Flush’, and ‘chronicpain’, age 47, of Utah, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to distribute and possess with attempt to distribute cocaine. … According to his plea agreement, beginning in November 2012, Green worked for the creator and operator of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, whom Green only knew by his alias, ‘Dread Pirate Roberts.’ Silk Road was an online, international marketplace that allowed users to anonymously buy and sell illegal drugs, false identifications, and other contraband over the internet.


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa-idUSBREA2U0TY20140331. 7 Deep Web. Directed by Alex Winter. Performed by Cindy Cohn, Andy Greenberg. Epix, 2015. VoD. 8 “Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to Life in Prison.” FBI. May 29, 2015. Accessed June 22, 2015. https://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2015/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-life-in-prison. 9 Kelion, Leo. “NSA and GCHQ Agents ‘leak Tor Bugs’, Alleges Developer - BBC News.” BBC News. August 22, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28886462. 10 “Schumer Pushes to Shut Down Online Drug Marketplace.”

Satoshi Nakamoto: The anonymous creator of Bitcoin, suspected to be one person or several people. Dread Pirate Roberts: The leader of the infamous Silk Road underground marketplace. May be a group of people or a name passed from person to person. Amir Taaki: Dark Wallet co-creator and lead developer of Darkmarket, later forked to Open Bazaar. Peter Todd: Bitcoin core developer. Ross Ulbricht: Was accused and convicted of being Dread Pirate Roberts; his case is under appeal. Roger Ver: Angel investor and Bitcoin evangelist; CEO of Memorydealers.com, one of the first sites to accept Bitcoin, and founder of the company Blockchain. Cody Wilson: Dark Wallet co-creator and 3D-printed gun designer.

They managed to track down a seller with the username Chronicpain; they seized his and other sellers’ accounts but didn’t arrest the owners of those accounts. From there, they managed to communicate with Dread Pirate Roberts and implicate him in a large number of crimes. The crime that got the most media attention and was used to deny Ross Ulbricht bail was the alleged ordering of three murders. According to the government’s accounts, Dread Pirate Roberts ordered three hits: one in retaliation for a theft, one on a former vendor turned witness, and one on a blackmailer. The total murder-for-hire count was eventually raised to six, and Ulbricht was deemed a “threat to society” and denied bail.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

How a Computer Nerd became the FBI’s Most Wanted Drug Dealer 54 David Kushner, ‘Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall,’ Rolling Stone, February 4, 2014, accessed March 1, 2014, http://rol.st/1tHFaGu. 55 Patrick Howell O’Neill, ‘How big is the Internet’s most notorious black market?,’ The Daily Dot, July 30, 2013, accessed May 14, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8ON. 56 Fran Berkman, ‘Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Was a Dirty Hippie, Best Friend Says,’ Mashable, November 4, 2013, accessed March 1, 2014, http://on.mash.to/1tHF8y5. 57 Ibid. 58 Ross Ulbricht, ‘Thoughts on Freedom,’ July 6, 2010, accessed March 1, 2014, http://on.fb.me/1trBch6. 59 Adam Taylor, ‘Alleged Founder Of Silk Road Posted LinkedIn Manifesto About Using Economic Theory To Change The World,’ Business Insider, October 2, 2013, accessed March 1, 2014, http://read.bi/1tHFbds. 60 Fran Berkman, ‘Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Was a Dirty Hippie, Best Friend Says,’ Mashable, November 4, 2013, accessed March 1, 2014, http://on.mash.to/1tHF8y5. 61 ‘Anonymous market online?

Poking their heads round the shelves, they saw him being pressed up against the window and handcuffed. He was, the FBI said, the Dread Pirate Roberts, reported to own over $30 million worth of bitcoins, to earn about $20,000 a day and to have amassed an $80 million fortune in 18 months. But he was in the Glen Park Library for the free wifi. The man they arrested was Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old from Austin, Texas. He is hardly the millionaire kingpin of the Hollywood variety. Rather, he’s a handsome nerd, a former physics student, living in a sub-let San Francisco room for $1,200 a month, for whom, according to an old college buddy, ‘bathing is optional’.56 ‘He’s a hippie.

The attempted murder charges relating to Redandwhite have been dropped, presumably because it is obvious Ulbricht was being scammed. But the Curtis Green charges are still live, as are charges of large-scale criminal enterprise, drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering. Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty. A campaign has begun to help him raise the money to fight his case, Free Ross Ulbricht – freeross.org. Why Bitcoin will end the war on drugs The FBI congratulated themselves. Over a year’s work and they had got their man. It was a great victory. The bitcoin price fell from $140 to $110 in just a few hours. The Silk Road had been busted. FBI agent Christopher Tarbell was hailed as the ‘Elliott Ness of cyberspace’.70 Many libertarians saw it as a loss.


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Bitcoin’s cryptography is solid, but it’s a bit like putting a six inch thick steel vault door in a cardboard frame. Anonymous! Bitcoin was widely touted early on as anonymous – on the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a dog. Of course, with every confirmed transaction logged in the blockchain forever, it’s pseudonymous at best; as the case of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road showed (see Chapter 4), law enforcement will happily do the tedious legwork of tracing your transactions if you motivate them sufficiently. There are ways to increase your anonymity, such as mixers – send coins to an address, they shuffle them with other people’s coins, and you get them back later minus a percentage.

Karpelès is still dealing with the Japanese authorities, including being arrested for embezzlement in August 2015 and held in custody for several months, with his trial starting in July 2017 (though he maintains his innocence). McCaleb went on to develop the cryptocurrencies Ripple and Stellar; his LinkedIn page107 details his career back to eDonkey, but chooses to omit Mt. Gox. Drugs and the Darknet: The Silk Road Both Anne Frank, and Ross Ulbricht created dark markets to help people hide from violent oppressors who were trying to hurt peaceful people. – Roger Ver108 Anonymous or pseudonymous cryptocurrency has one obvious application: paying for things you’d rather not be caught buying or selling. Drug users take to new communication channels as soon as they’re invented; the first known e-commerce was the sale of marijuana between Stanford and MIT students over email in 1971 or 1972.109 Nakamoto noted in September 2010:110 Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have, either don’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing.

Drug users take to new communication channels as soon as they’re invented; the first known e-commerce was the sale of marijuana between Stanford and MIT students over email in 1971 or 1972.109 Nakamoto noted in September 2010:110 Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have, either don’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing. Ross Ulbricht grew up in Austin, Texas, born to a well-off family. He was an Eagle Scout; friends and acquaintances were widely impressed by what a polite, helpful young man he was. He studied physics and materials science at college. At Penn State, he took up with the College Libertarians group, and was an activist in support of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential bid.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

From this point on, the Tor browser should always be used to create and access all online accounts because it constantly changes your IP address. One of the first steps is to set up a couple of anonymous e-mail accounts using Tor. This was something that Ross Ulbricht neglected to do. As we saw in the previous chapter, he used his personal e-mail account more than once while conducting his Silk Road business on the Dark Web. These unintentional crossovers from Dread Pirate Roberts to Ross Ulbricht and back again helped investigators confirm that the two names were associated with one person. To prevent abuse, most e-mail providers—such as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo—require mobile phone verification.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The FBI Always Gets Its Man In the science fiction section of the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library, not far from his apartment, Ross William Ulbricht was engaged in an online customer-support chat for the company he owned. At the time—October of 2013—the person on the other end of the Internet chat thought he was talking to the site’s admin, who went by the Internet name of Dread Pirate Roberts, a name taken from the movie The Princess Bride. Roberts, also known as DPR, was in fact Ross Ulbricht—not only the admin but also the owner of Silk Road, an online drug emporium, and as such was the subject of a federal manhunt.1 Ulbricht frequently used public Wi-Fi locations such as the library for his work, perhaps under the mistaken impression that the FBI, should it ever identify him as DPR, would never conduct a raid in a public place.

ProxyHam is a very remote access point. Using it is much like putting a Wi-Fi transmitter in your home or office. Except that the person using and controlling ProxyHam could be up to a mile away. The Wi-Fi transmitter uses a 900 MHz radio to connect to an antenna dongle on a computer as far as 2.5 miles away. So in the case of Ross Ulbricht, the FBI could have been amassing outside the Glen Park library while he was in someone’s basement doing laundry several blocks away. The need for such devices is clear if you live in an oppressed country. Contacting the outside world through Tor is a risk many take. This kind of device would add another layer of security by masking the geolocation of the requester.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The Zuckerberg-backed group Joshio Meronek, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Immigration Hustle,” March 12, 2015, fusion.net; Matt Smith, Jennifer Gollan, and Adithya Sambamurthy, “Job Brokers Steal Wages, Entrap Indian Tech Workers in US,” October 27, 2014, revealnews.org. Ross Ulbricht Benjamin Weiser, “Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Website, Is Sentenced to Life in Prison,” May 29, 2015, nytimes.com; Joe Mullin, “Sunk: How Ross Ulbricht Ended Up in Prison for Life,” May 29, 2015, arstechnica.com; US v. Carl Mark Force IV et al., March 25, 2015, US District Court, Northern California Circuit, Case No. 3-15-70370. Blake Benthall Evan Sernoffsky, Henry K.

one curious Weekender interjected. “That’s right!” I said. People got it. Mercenary attitudes were so common in Silicon Valley that no one lectured me about propriety. People mainly wanted to know how I intended to get away with a patently unlawful conspiracy. This was a reasonable concern. One of my inspirations, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison for operating an illegal drug market called Silk Road. Accessible only through the Pentagon-funded Tor network—also known as the Dark Web—Silk Road allegedly processed more than one million transactions comprising $1.2 billion in revenue over two years. Ulbricht, a former Eagle Scout, was just about my age.

Nick Land “Premises of Neoreaction,” February 3, 2014, xenosystems.net. Yarvin claimed to have watched Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-White,” October 5, 2017, buzzfeed.com. For its targets, Gamergate My interviews with Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper; “Game of Fear,” May 2015, Boston Magazine. Katherine Bolan Forrest Yannick Losbar, “Ross Ulbricht Silk Road Trial Judge Facing Death Threats on Dark Net,” October 20, 2014, cryptocoinsnews.com; Rich Calder, “Judge in Silk Road Case Gets Death Threats,” October 24, 2014, nypost.com. His name became more familiar J. Lester Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” November 15, 2016, buzzfeed.com; Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” February 10, 2017, nytimes.com.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com. Searching the web for Ross Ulbricht led to a young man from Texas who, just like Dread Pirate Roberts, admired Ludwig von Mises and Ron Paul. Alford was pretty sure he had the proprietor of Silk Road, but it took him more than three months to convince the FBI that this was their man. Two months after Ross Ulbricht was arrested, the notorious cyberanarchist Cody Wilson, inventor of the world’s first 3-D-printed handgun, stood onstage in London at the MIT Bitcoin Expo and castigated his colleagues: “Ross Ulbricht is alleged to be the founder and operator of Silk Road, the glittering jewel of all things libertarian, black market, and wonderful.

In a sad postscript to Pallente’s efforts to change the DMCA, Google and their ally Public Knowledge created a campaign to push Pallante out of the office that controls copyright policy. Pallante was fired in October of 2016. 5. The final tale of the pirates of the Internet concerns Dread Pirate Roberts, a.k.a. Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, the Internet drug marketplace that the FBI claimed grossed more than $1 billion between 2011 and 2013. Ulbricht’s life had been changed by reading Ayn Rand, and the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, the oracle of the modern American libertarian movement. According to Mises, a citizen must have economic freedom in order to be politically and morally free.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

All of them eager to be there, gravitating toward the twins as they worked to turn Bitcoin into something respectable. And up until today, fighting that fight had meant Silk Road was hanging around their neck every day like a drug-addled albatross. And now suddenly, just like that, it was gone: cooked, just like Ross Ulbricht, the twenty-nine-year-old who had been IDed as the mogul behind the biggest illegal drug bazaar in history. “Dread Pirate Roberts is going to jail.” Dread Pirate Roberts was the online name Ulbricht had given himself, after the Cary Elwes character in the movie The Princess Bride. In the movie, he’s a mythic character who, it turned out, is actually multiple pirates, the name being handed down from generation to generation.

And Amsterdam had just been one stop on what he’d begun to think of as his Comeback Tour: a multiweek, globe-trotting excursion, filled with speaking gigs, meet-ups, and sit-downs. Everyone wanted to talk about Bitcoin. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the price had skyrocketed since Silk Road had gone down, actually reaching $1,000 a coin within one month of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest. The tenfold rise was incredible to fathom: the Winklevoss twins alone were now sitting on $200 million in Bitcoin. And though BitInstant might have been down—temporarily closed, momentarily shuttered—Charlie certainly wasn’t; he was still one of the main faces of Bitcoin. Even if the twins weren’t taking his calls, even if they were really trying to move past him, even if his site was technically down, he would return, bigger and brasher than ever.

Over to his right, about five yards away, he could see the prosecuting team. Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. Attorney who had been the front man on the case since before Charlie had agreed to settle, and Turner’s various assistants. Fitting, since Turner had also led the prosecution against Silk Road that had sent Ross Ulbricht to prison for life. Next to them, Preet Bharara himself, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, the famous prosecutor who had taken down too many white-collar criminals and Wall Street bankers to count. And somewhere behind them, the IRS agent who had first arrested Charlie at JFK, Gary Alford, there to witness the results of all his hard work.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

And OTF promised that this was just a start: “By leveraging social network effects, we expect to expand to a billion regular users taking advantage of OTF-supported tools and Internet Freedom technologies by 2015.”132 False Sense of Security While accolades for the Tor Project, Signal, and other crypto apps funded by the US government rolled in, a deeper look showed that they were not as secure or as impervious to government penetration as their proponents claimed. Perhaps no story better exemplifies the flaws in impenetrable crypto security than that of Ross Ulbricht, otherwise known as Dread Pirate Roberts, the architect of Silk Road. After its founding in 2012, Silk Road grew rapidly and appeared to be a place where organized criminals could hide in plain sight—until it wasn’t. In October 2013, four months after Edward Snowden came out of hiding and endorsed Tor, a twenty-nine-year-old native Texan by the name of Ross Ulbricht was arrested in a public library in San Francisco. He was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts and was charged with multiple counts of money laundering, narcotics trafficking, hacking, and, on top of it all, murder.

In 2015, when I first read these statements from the Tor Project, I was shocked. This was nothing less than a veiled admission that Tor was useless at guaranteeing anonymity and that it required attackers to behave “ethically” in order for it to remain secure. It must have come as an even greater shock to the cypherpunk believers like Ross Ulbricht, who trusted Tor to run his highly illegal Internet business and who is now in jail for the rest of his life. Tor’s spat with the researchers at Carnegie Mellon University revealed another confusing dynamic. Whereas one part of the federal government—which included the Pentagon, State Department, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors—funded the ongoing development of the Tor Project, another wing of this same federal government—which included the Pentagon, the FBI, and possibly other agencies—was working just as hard to crack it.

David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (New York: Dutton, 2012). 57. Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities (December 1994), https://invisiblemolotov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/crypto_anarchist.pdf. 58. Dread Pirate Roberts, message on the Silk Road Forum, March 20, 2012 (United States of America v. Ross Ulbricht, Exhibit 4, filed April 16, 2015). 59. Aaron Sankin, “Searching for a Hitman in the Deep Web,” Daily Dot, October 10, 2013, https://www.dailydot.com/crime/deep-web-murder-assassination-contract-killer/. 60. Gary Brecher and Mark Ames, “Interview with Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson,” Radio War Nerd, episode 28, April 7, 2016, https://www.patreon.com/posts /radio-war-nerd-7–5106280. 61.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Governments have never been able to achieve their prohibitionist aims but they do create conditions that lead to massive carnage. So far as I’m concerned, the site founder and administrator who called himself the “Dread Pirate Roberts” should get the Nobel Peace Prize. The person alleged to hold this title is Ross Ulbricht, with whom I corresponded as the site was being conceived. It was obvious to me that he loved human liberty and explicitly so. He stuck his neck out to make progress in human affairs possible, just as every great entrepreneur in history. Governments have expended trillions of dollars, caused a million deaths, and shredded every civilized liberty in the name of the war on drugs.

Lots of people just use them recreationally. There’s really nothing more to say. But instead of thanking the Silk Road for doing for society what needs to be done—a brilliant and peaceful alternative to ghastly war—the State shut it down, arrested the alleged mastermind. That man, who is now in jail, is my friend Ross Ulbricht, and he is a brilliant and wonderful person, as is his mother who works every day for real justice for her son. In the meantime, what has happened? Silk Road 2.0 came up. It was doing booming business, more than ever, for a full year. The old products were all back. The user reviews were back.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

The FBI estimated that between February 6, 2011, and July 23, 2013, over 1.2 million transactions on the site generated sales of 9.5 million bitcoins. (Given the wild fluctuations in price during that time, it’s hard to extrapolate how much that is in dollars.) It would come to an end in October 2013 when the FBI arrested a Texas native named Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library. The agency charged him with money laundering and conspiracy to traffic narcotics—to which Ulbricht has, as of the time of writing, pleaded not guilty; his lawyer has said he is not Dread Pirate Roberts. The agency also said he solicited six murders-for-hire, though there was no evidence anybody was killed.

Moneyed investors came, following in the footsteps of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—the twin brothers famous for their legal tussles with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—who had announced back in April that they had acquired a massive stock of bitcoin then worth $11 million. As bitcoin’s price began to rise, rise, and rise further, the twins’ investment started looking well timed indeed. Not even the dramatic October 2 news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts mastermind of the Silk Road site, and had seized 26,000 bitcoins, then worth $3.6 million, would pose much of a setback. The price went from $125 at the end of September to $198 a month later, even as word spread on October 26 that the FBI had hauled in an additional 144,000 bitcoins (then $28 million) from its Silk Road operation.

Feedback Requested,” Bitcoin Forum, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3984.260. In August 2012, Forbes’s Andy Greenberg: Andy Greenberg, “Black Market Drug Site ‘Silk Road’ Booming: $22 Million in Annual Sales,” Forbes, August 6, 2012. The FBI estimated that between February 6, 2011: From the FBI complaint against Ross Ulbricht, September 27, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/doc/172773561/Criminal-Complaint-Against-Silk-Road-and-Dread-Pirate-Roberts. Trading platforms for bitcoin started appearing: Various developments in 2011–12 taken from the timeline at http://historyofbitcoin.org/. Charlie Shrem, a Brooklyn-based twenty-one-year-old: Adrianne Jeffries, “Bored with Bitcoin?


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In the abstract, this may seem like a flimsy justification for why tech companies are valuable; when thinking about something that represents billions of dollars of value, one naturally expects that value to be backed up by something tangible like physical resources or government force, not just some ethereal instantiation of the fact that it’s hard for large groups of people to suddenly move from one social configuration to another.19 “Fortunately,” concludes Buterik in the blog post, “we still have many decades to go in seeing exactly how the decentralized protocol ecosystem is going to play out.” It looks like an interesting future indeed. Notes 1. See the link to OB1 at https://www.usv.com/portfolio#2015. 2. The video is posted on YouTube and available at https://youtu.be/nuRgHbTU9pk. 3. Benjamin Weiser, “Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Website, Is Sentenced to Life in Prison,” New York Times, May 29, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/nyregion/ross-ulbricht-creator-of-silk-road-website-is-sentenced-to-life-in-prison.html. 4. Andy Greenberg, “Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ Prototype, a Silk Road the FRI Can Never Seize,” Wired, April 24, 2014. http://www.wired.com/2014/04/darkmarket. 5.

It evolved from a prototype peer-to-peer market called DarkMarket developed in April 2014 by Amir Taaki, the founder of the Internet anarchist group unSYSTEM. Taaki created DarkMarket following the shuttering of a market called the Silk Road, best known for facilitating the sales of illegal drugs, and whose founder Ross Ulbricht is currently serving a life sentence in a US prison.3 “Like a hydra, those of us in the community that push for individual empowerment are in an arms race to equip the people with the tools needed for the next generation of digital black markets,” Taaki explained to Wired reporter Andy Greenberg in 2014.4 On its website, OpenBazaar commits to “zero fees,” indicating that because there are no parties in the middle of the transactions, there are no fees to pay.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Worse, the antics of the bumbling Bitcoin Foundation paled next to what serious criminals were doing with the currency. In late 2013, the media reported the arrest of the Dread Pirate Roberts—the mastermind behind the global drug bazaar known as the Silk Road. In a fit-for-Hollywood moment, disguised FBI agents tackled the Dread Pirate—aka Ross Ulbricht—in a San Francisco library and, critically, snatched away his laptop before he could close the cover and encrypt all the data it contained. The laptop provided oodles of information about Ulbricht’s sprawling criminal empire, including the keys to his vast stashes of bitcoin—the currency that had made the Silk Road possible in the first place.

Alford has a strange habit—he always reads documents three times—but this idiosyncrasy paid off when, on one of his triple readings, he recognized a connection between a Gmail address and the Dread Pirate Roberts, the anonymous mastermind of the Silk Road. Alford’s discovery led the Justice Department to identify and convict Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate. Alford’s colleague Utzke had foreseen the rise of digital money way back in the 1980s and chose a novel concentration of studies in college—economics, forensic accounting, and computer science—in anticipation of something like bitcoin arriving one day. At the IRS, as the crypto markets picked up steam in early 2016, he embarked on an investigation of crypto tax evasion.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

Now that people had a reason to want bitcoin, the price of bitcoin relative to dollars started to rise. By early 2011, you could exchange one dollar for one bitcoin. After the website Gawker published the first mainstream story about Silk Road in June, the exchange rate spiked to more than $30 per bitcoin. In 2013, the FBI arrested a man named Ross Ulbricht, who they said was the Dread Pirate Roberts, the creator of Silk Road. Ulbricht was tried and found guilty of drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit money laundering. “The stated purpose [of Silk Road] was to be beyond the law,” the judge said at Ulbricht’s sentencing. “In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist.”

The quotes from the Dread Pirate Roberts are from “Collected Quotations of the Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder of Underground Drug Site Silk Road and Radical Libertarian,” published in Forbes. The drug listings from the Silk Road are from a Sept. 27, 2013, complaint filed in United States v. Ross William Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts. The quote from Ulbricht’s sentencing is from the Wired story “Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison,” by Andy Greenberg. The Senate hearing was called “Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies.” Testimony is posted on the committee’s website. The Washington Post story “This Senate hearing is a bitcoin lovefest” was by Timothy B.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Gox’s Missing Bitcoins,” Computerworld, December 31, 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2863167/police-blame-fraud-for-most-of-mt-goxs-missing-bitcoins.html. 24 “MtGox Bitcoin Chief Mark Karpeles Charged in Japan,” BBC News, September 11, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34217495. 25 Adrian Chen, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” Gawker, June 1, 2011, http://gawker.com/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imag-30818160. 26 Sarah Jeong, “The DHS Agent Who Infiltrated Silk Road to Take Down Its Kingpin,” Forbes, January 14, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/01/14/the-dhs-agent-who-infiltrated-silk-road-to-take-down-its-kingpin/#6250111369dd. 27 Andy Greenberg, “Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Convicted of All 7 Charges,” WIRED, February 4, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/02/silk-road-ross-ulbricht-verdict/. 28 Riley Snyder, “California Investor Wins Federal Government’s Bitcoin Auction,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-bitcoin-auction-20140702-story.html. 29 John Biggs, “US Marshals to Sell 44,000 BTC at Auction in November,” TechCrunch, October 5, 2015, http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/10/05/us-marshals-to-sell-44000-btc-at-auction-in-november/. 30 “FAQ—Bitcoin,” Bitcoin.org, accessed May 29, 2016, https://bitcoin.org/en/faq. 31 Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 9, 1993, https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/cypherpunk.manifesto. 32 Joichi Ito, “Shenzhen Trip Report—Visiting the World’s Manufacturing Ecosystem,” Joi Ito’s Web, September 1, 2014, http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html. 33 “Phantom Series—Intelligent Drones,” DJI, http://www.dji.com/products/phantom. 34 “The World’s First and Largest Hardware Accelerator,” HAX, https://hax.co/.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Everything changed in autumn 2013. Despite the efforts of site administrators and the Silk Road communities, undercover FBI agents had been making purchases on Silk Road from November 2011, and had been closely tracking DPR and other key vendors and site admins. On 1 October 2013, they arrested twenty-nine-year-old Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library on suspicion of drug trafficking, soliciting murder, facilitating computer hacking and money laundering.fn2 They believed that they had found the Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht was a university graduate and self-confessed libertarian who, until his arrest, had been living under the name Joshua Terrey in a small shared flat near to the library.

Perhaps someday even the “war on drugs” will end because the masses will understand us instead of fearing us. To sum up the entirety of this post and to answer your question, the Silk Road, to me, means hope.’ p.138 ‘On 1 October 2013 . . .’ http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/04/world/americas/silk-road-ross-ulbricht/, see also http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/silk-road-mastermind-unmasked-by-rookie-goofs-complaint-alleges/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24371894. p.138 ‘He had told his housemates . . .’ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/ulbricht-delay/. The FBI’s investigation was led by Christopher Tarbell, the agent responsible for the 2011 New York sting that caught LulzSec hacker Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu).


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

At this point, bitcoin’s spike captured the attention of the People’s Bank of China, which promptly implemented restrictions on bitcoin’s use, declaring it was “not a currency in the real meaning of the word.”5 The China ruling, combined with the FBI’s capture of the creator of the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht,6 and soon thereafter the collapse of the biggest exchange at the time, Mt. Gox,7 put many bitcoin investors on edge as to its long-term viability in the face of government and law enforcement crackdowns.8 Bitcoin’s subsequent price descent through all of 2014, bottoming in January 2015, was volatile, prolonged, and dispiriting for many early adopters who had been drawn to the new concept.

CoinDesk BPI. 3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-be-the-global-economys-last-safe-haven. 4. http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/27/investing/bitcoin-1000/; http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/18/technology/bitcoin-regulation/?iid=EL. 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/international/china-bars-banks-from-using-bitcoin.html. 6. https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/press-releases/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-life-in-prison. 7. https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/feb/25/bitcoin-mt-gox-scandal-reputation-crime. 8. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24371894. 9. Bitcoiner refers to an advocate of Bitcoin. 10. We’ll describe wallets in detail in Chapter 14. 11. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q3digitalcurrenciesbitcoin1.pdf. 12. http://insidebitcoins.com/new-york/2015. 13. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-masters-tells-banks-the-blockchain-changes-everything. 14. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21677198-technology-behind-bitcoin-could-transform-how-economy-works-trust-machine. 15.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

After all, the US’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged it runs agents who pose as fake hit men, men who wear the jewellery, sleeveless tank tops and facial hair of biker gangs, entrapping those who seek guns for hire.35 In a twist of irony, it was even alleged that Ross Ulbricht, the supposed founder of Silk Road – a TOR portal that sells all manner of narcotics, drugs and illegal services – commissioned the murder of six people through hitmen he had contacted on the internet.36 Nobody was actually murdered, although the FBI did say they had faked the death of one former employee of Silk Road and claimed they had convinced Ulbricht the murder had taken place.

Many categories of guns, including automatics and some handguns, are banned from sale altogether. 34. A ban on semi-automatic rifles was introduced in September 2011, but it was lifted at the end of February 2013. 35. http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201311/fake-hitman-murder-for-hire 36. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/21/alleged-silk-road-ross-ulbricht-creator-now-accused-of-six-murder-for-hires-denied-bail/ 37. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/02/silk-roads-mastermind-allegedly-paid-80000-for-a-hitman-the-hitman-was-a-cop/ 38. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was not the original plan. John Wilkes Booth and a group of co-conspirators were meant to kidnap the president and hold him hostage in exchange for prisoners.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

One way to understand the fundamental nature of the crypto-anarchist challenge to the state is to consider how the authorities are responding. There is exactly zero chance that governments of the world will give up on taxation or censorship – they will try to crush crypto-anarchy first. When the founder of Silk Road Ross Ulbricht, also known by the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, was finally caught, he was sentenced to multiple life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. On delivering this draconian sentence in 2015, Judge Forrest told the court that Silk Road’s very existence was ‘. . . deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous’.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

DEA staff were instructed to lie in court to conceal that the NSA passed data to the agency. The NSA’s term is “parallel construction.” The agency receiving the NSA information must invent some other way of getting at it, one that is admissible in court. The FBI probably got the evidence needed to arrest the hacker Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran the anonymous Silk Road website where people could buy drugs and more, in this way. Mission creep is also happening in the UK, where surveillance intended to nab terrorists is being used against political protesters, and in all sorts of minor criminal cases: against people who violate a smoking ban, falsify their address, and fail to clean up after their dogs.

., 230 business models, surveillance-based, 50, 56, 113–14, 206 Buzzfeed, 28–29 cable companies, surveillance by, 47–48 CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act; 1994), 83, 120, 165 need for repeal of, 182 Callahan, Mary Ellen, 162–63 Cameron, David, 222, 228 Canada, in international intelligence partnerships, 76 Caproni, Valerie, 83 Carnegie Mellon University, 41 Carter, Jimmy, 230 cash registers, as computers, 14 cell phone metadata: NSA collection of, 20–21, 36, 37, 62, 138, 339 Stanford University experiment on, 21–22 cell phones: GPS-enabled, 3, 14 multiple functions of, 46 NSA’s remote activation of, 30 as surveillance devices, 1–3, 14, 28, 39, 46–47, 62, 100, 216–17, 219, 339 wiretapping of, 148 censorship, 94–95, 106–7, 187–88 self-, 95, 96 Census Bureau, US, 197 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 67 in domestic surveillance operations, 104 Senate Intelligence Committee hacked by, 102 Chambers, John, 122 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 232, 364 chat services, 13, 83, 119, 226 government surveillance of, 29, 62, 81 checks and balances: oversight and, 175 secrecy and, 100 Chicago Police Department, 160 China: censorship in, 94, 95, 150–51, 187, 237 cyberattacks from, 42, 73, 132, 142, 148, 149, 180 50 Cent Party in, 114 mass surveillance by, 70, 86, 140, 209 Uighur terrorists in, 219, 287 ChoicePoint, 79, 116 Christie, Chris, 102 Church committee, 176 Cisco, 85, 122 Clapper, James, 129, 130, 336 Clinton, Hillary, 101, 106 Clinton administration, 120 Clipper Chip, 120–21 cloud computing, 5, 59, 60 consumer rights and, 60, 221 government surveillance and, 122 incriminating materials and, 59, 272 CNET, 125 Cobham, 3, 244 Code of Fair Information Practices (1973), 194 Code Pink, 104 Cohen, Jared, 4 COINTELPRO, 103 Cold War, 63, 71, 75, 207, 229 “collect,” NSA’s use of term, 129 Comcast, 358 as information middleman, 57 surveillance by, 48–49 commons, as lacking on Internet, 188–89 communication: computers as devices for, 13–14 ephemeral vs. recorded, 127–29 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act see CALEA Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), 40–41 Communists, Communism, 92–93 fall of, 63 complexity, as enemy of security, 141 Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, 69 computers, computing: cash registers as, 14 as communication devices, 13–14 cost of, 24 data as by-product of, 3–4, 5, 13–19 increasing power of, 35 smartphones as, 14 see also electronic devices Computer Security Act (1987), 187 COMSEC (communications security), 164–65 Congress, US, 237 NSA oversight by, 172–76 privacy laws and, 198–99 secrecy and, 100 “connect-the-dots” metaphor, 136, 139, 322 consent, as lacking in mass surveillance, 5, 20, 51 Consent of the Networked (MacKinnon), 210, 212 Constitution, US: Bill of Rights of, 210 First Amendment of, 189 Fourth Amendment of, 67, 156, 170 warrant process and, 92, 179, 184 Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (proposed), 201, 202 consumer rights: cloud computing and, 30 data collection and, 192–93, 200–203, 211 convenience, surveillance exchanged for, 4, 49, 51, 58–59, 60–61 cookies, 47–48, 49 correlation of, 49 correlation, of data sets, 40–45, 49, 133, 263–64 Counterintelligence Field Activity, 69, 104 counterterrorism: excessive secrecy in, 171 as FBI mission, 184, 186 fear and, 222, 226, 227–30 mass surveillance as ineffective tool in, 137–40, 228 as NSA mission, 63, 65–66, 184, 222 NSA’s claimed successes in, 325 Creative Cloud, 60 credit bureaus, as data brokers, 52 credit card companies, data collected by, 14, 23–24 credit card fraud, 116, 313 data mining and, 136–37 credit cards, RFID chips on, 29 credit scores, 112–13, 159, 196 Credit Suisse, 35–36 CREDO Mobile, 207 Cryptocat, 215 cryptography, see encryption cultural change: systemic imperfection and, 163–64 transparency and, 161 Customer Relations Management (CRM), 51–52 customer scores, 110–11 Cyber Command, US, 75, 146, 180–81, 186, 187 cybercrime, increasing scale of, 116–19, 142 cyber sovereignty, 187–88 cyberwarfare, 74–75, 81, 132, 220 arms race in, 180–81 attack vs. defense in, 140–43 collateral damage from, 150–51 military role in, 185–86 NIST’s proposed defensive role in, 186–87 see also Cyber Command, US Dalai Lama, 72 Daniel, Jon, 101 data: analysis of, see data mining as by-product of computing, 3–4, 5, 13–19 historical, 35–37 increasing amount of, 18–19 see also metadata data broker industry, 2, 5, 41, 48, 51–53, 79, 234 correction of errors in, 269 customer scores in, 110–11 lack of consent in, 5, 51 data collection, 234 accountability and, 193, 196, 197–99 benefits of, 8, 190 fiduciary responsibility and, 204–5 government regulation and, 197–99 harms from, 8 health and, 16 limits on, 191, 192, 199–200, 202, 206 NSA definition of, 129, 320 opt-in vs. opt-out consent in, 198 respect for context in, 201 rights of individuals in, 192–93, 200–203, 211, 232 salience of, 203–4 security safeguards in, 192, 193–95, 202, 211 from social networking sites, 200–201 specification of purpose in, 192 see also mass surveillance Dataium, 195–96 data mining, 33–45 adversarial relationships and, 138–39 algorithmic-based, 129–31, 136–37, 159, 196 anonymity and, 42–45 correlation of data sets in, 40–45, 49, 133 credit card fraud and, 136–37 of historical data, 35–37 inferences from, see inferences, from data mining limits on uses of, 191, 192, 195–97, 206 personalized advertising and, 33, 35, 38 political campaigns and, 33, 54 quality assurance and, 34, 54, 136–37, 192, 194, 202 relationship mapping in, 37–38 security threats and, 136–40 tax fraud and, 137 data storage: capacity for, 18–19 cloud-based, 5, 59 limits on, 191, 199–200, 206 low cost of, 5, 18, 24, 144, 206 “save everything” model of, 34 Datensparsamkeit, 200 de-anonymizing, by correlation of data sets, 43–44, 263–64 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 210 Defense Department, US: Counterintelligence Field Activity of, 69, 104 Cyber Command of, 75 domestic surveillance by, 69, 184 Defentek, 3 delete, right to, 201–2 democracy: government surveillance and, 6, 95, 97–99, 161–62, 172–73 whistleblowers as essential to, 178 demographic information, data brokers and, 52 denial-of-service attacks, 75 Department of Homeland Security, US, 27, 162–63, 295–96 deportation, discrimination and, 93 DigiNotar, hacking of, 71–72 direct marketing, 52 discrimination: corporate surveillance and, 109–13 government surveillance and, 4, 6, 93, 103–4 in pricing, 109–10 DNA sequencing, 16 de-anonymizing of, 44 DNS injection, 150–51 Doctorow, Cory, 217 “Do Not Track” debate, 80 Do Not Track law, California, 233 DoNotTrackMe, 49 “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, 197 DoubleClick, 48 Drake, Thomas, 101 Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), 105 drone helicopters, 25, 29 micro-, 253 drone strikes, mass surveillance and, 94 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 104, 105 Dubai, 27, 43 DuckDuckGo, 124 due process, 168, 184 Duffy, Tim, 227 East Germany, 23 eBay, 57–58 Economist, 91 EDGEHILL, 85 education, collection of data and, 8 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 230 Elbit Systems, 81 Elcomsoft, 150 electronic devices, vendor control of, 59–60 Ello, 124 Ellsberg, Daniel, 101 e-mail, 119, 226 local vs. cloud storage of, 31 Emanuel, Rahm, 234 encryption, 85–86, 224, 344 backdoors and, 86, 120–21, 123, 147–48, 169, 182, 314 business competitiveness and, 119–24 increased corporate use of, 208, 224 individual use of, 215 key length in, 143 NIST and, 186–87 NSA and, 144, 186 NSA undermining of standards for, 148–49 secrecy and, 171 value of, 143–44 Engel, Tobias, 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pollution regulation by, 194–95 ephemerality, of communication, 127–29 Epsilon, 41 Equifax, 53 error rates, in data mining, 34, 54, 136–37, 269 espionage, 63, 73, 74, 76, 158 surveillance vs., 170, 183–84 Espionage Act (1917), 101 Estonia, cyberattacks on, 75, 132 Ethiopia, 73 European Charter, 169 European Court of Justice, 202, 222 European Parliament, 76 European Union (EU), 195, 200, 202, 226, 238 Charter of Fundamental Rights of, 232, 364 Data Protection Directive of, 19, 79, 80, 159, 191, 209 data retention rules in, 222 Exact Data, 42 executive branch: abuses of power by, 234–35 secrecy of, 100, 170 Executive Order 12333, 65, 173 Facebook, 58, 59, 93, 198 customer scores and, 111 data collection by, 19, 31, 41, 123, 200, 201, 204 as information middleman, 57 manipulation of posts on, 115 paid placements on, 114 real name policy of, 49 Facebook, surveillance by: data-based inferences of, 34, 258 Like button and, 48 relationship mapping by, 37–38 tagged photo database of, 41 face recognition, automatic, 27, 29, 31, 41, 211 fair information practices, 194, 211 fair lending laws, 196 false positives, 137, 138, 140, 323–24 Farrell, Henry, 60 FASCIA, 3 fatalism, mass surveillance and, 224–25 fear: government surveillance and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 media and, 229 politicians and, 222, 228 privacy trumped by, 228 social norms and, 227–30 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): CALEA and, 83, 120 COINTELPRO program of, 103 cost to business of surveillance by, 121–22 counterterrorism as mission of, 184, 186 data mining by, 42 GPS tracking by, 26, 95 historical data stored by, 36 illegal spying by, 175 IMSI-catchers used by, 165 legitimate surveillance by, 184 Muslim Americans surveilled by, 103 PATRIOT Act and, 173–74 phone company databases demanded by, 27, 67 surveillance of all communications as goal of, 83 warrantless surveillance by, 67–68, 209 wiretapping by, 24, 27, 83, 171 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 198 Federal Trade Commission, US (FTC), 46–47, 53, 117, 198 Feinstein, Diane, 172 Ferguson, Mo., 160 fiduciary responsibility, data collection and, 204–5 50 Cent Party, 114 FileVault, 215 filter bubble, 114–15 FinFisher, 81 First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, 91 FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; 1978), 273 FISA Amendments Act (2008), 171, 273, 275–76 Section 702 of, 65–66, 173, 174–75, 261 FISA Court, 122, 171 NSA misrepresentations to, 172, 337 secret warrants of, 174, 175–76, 177 transparency needed in, 177 fishing expeditions, 92, 93 Fitbit, 16, 112 Five Eyes, 76 Flame, 72 FlashBlock, 49 flash cookies, 49 Ford Motor Company, GPS data collected by, 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA; 1978), 273 see also FISA Amendments Act Forrester Research, 122 Fortinet, 82 Fox-IT, 72 France, government surveillance in, 79 France Télécom, 79 free association, government surveillance and, 2, 39, 96 freedom, see liberty Freeh, Louis, 314 free services: overvaluing of, 50 surveillance exchanged for, 4, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 226, 235 free speech: as constitutional right, 189, 344 government surveillance and, 6, 94–95, 96, 97–99 Internet and, 189 frequent flyer miles, 219 Froomkin, Michael, 198 FTC, see Federal Trade Commission, US fusion centers, 69, 104 gag orders, 100, 122 Gamma Group, 81 Gandy, Oscar, 111 Gates, Bill, 128 gay rights, 97 GCHQ, see Government Communications Headquarters Geer, Dan, 205 genetic data, 36 geofencing, 39–40 geopolitical conflicts, and need for surveillance, 219–20 Georgia, Republic of, cyberattacks on, 75 Germany: Internet control and, 188 NSA surveillance of, 76, 77, 122–23, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 surveillance of citizens by, 350 US relations with, 151, 234 Ghafoor, Asim, 103 GhostNet, 72 Gill, Faisal, 103 Gmail, 31, 38, 50, 58, 219 context-sensitive advertising in, 129–30, 142–43 encryption of, 215, 216 government surveillance of, 62, 83, 148 GoldenShores Technologies, 46–47 Goldsmith, Jack, 165, 228 Google, 15, 27, 44, 48, 54, 221, 235, 272 customer loyalty to, 58 data mining by, 38 data storage capacity of, 18 government demands for data from, 208 impermissible search ad policy of, 55 increased encryption by, 208 as information middleman, 57 linked data sets of, 50 NSA hacking of, 85, 208 PageRank algorithm of, 196 paid search results on, 113–14 search data collected by, 22–23, 31, 123, 202 transparency reports of, 207 see also Gmail Google Analytics, 31, 48, 233 Google Calendar, 58 Google Docs, 58 Google Glass, 16, 27, 41 Google Plus, 50 real name policy of, 49 surveillance by, 48 Google stalking, 230 Gore, Al, 53 government: checks and balances in, 100, 175 surveillance by, see mass surveillance, government Government Accountability Office, 30 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ): cyberattacks by, 149 encryption programs and, 85 location data used by, 3 mass surveillance by, 69, 79, 175, 182, 234 government databases, hacking of, 73, 117, 313 GPS: automobile companies’ use of, 29–30 FBI use of, 26, 95 police use of, 26 in smart phones, 3, 14 Grayson, Alan, 172 Great Firewall (Golden Shield), 94, 95, 150–51, 187, 237 Greece, wiretapping of government cell phones in, 148 greenhouse gas emissions, 17 Greenwald, Glenn, 20 Grindr, 259 Guardian, Snowden documents published by, 20, 67, 149 habeas corpus, 229 hackers, hacking, 42–43, 71–74, 216, 313 of government databases, 73, 117, 313 by NSA, 85 privately-made technology for, 73, 81 see also cyberwarfare Hacking Team, 73, 81, 149–50 HAPPYFOOT, 3 Harris Corporation, 68 Harris Poll, 96 Hayden, Michael, 23, 147, 162 health: effect of constant surveillance on, 127 mass surveillance and, 16, 41–42 healthcare data, privacy of, 193 HelloSpy, 3, 245 Hewlett-Packard, 112 Hill, Raquel, 44 hindsight bias, 322 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Home Depot, 110, 116 homosexuality, 97 Hoover, J.


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Kaminska, ‘Fintech’s security/access paradox problem’, Financial Times, ‘Alphaville’, 3 October 2016, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/10/03/2176471/fintechs-securityaccess-paradox-problem/. 16. Until 2013 the so-called Silk Road (DEF) was the primary e-commerce platform on the dark web. After its founder, Dread Pirate Roberts, or Ross Ulbricht, went down, it was succeeded by AlphaBay and many other dark marketplaces. Dread Pirate Roberts is now in prison serving a life sentence. The authorities still can’t get their hands on most of his bitcoins. 17. L. Katz, ‘Criminals may ditch bitcoin for Litecoin, Dash, study says’, Bloomberg, 8 February 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/criminals-are-ditching-bitcoin-for-litecoin-and-dash-study-says. 18.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

Users would log in to Silk Road using Tor, an anonymous virtual private networking (VPN) software. Tor uses a global network of computers to route internet traffic so it is almost impossible to trace. This allows users to remain anonymous by obscuring identifying information like IP addresses. In October 2013, after a long investigation, the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht for his role as the operator of Silk Road. They were able to catch Ulbricht by grabbing his encrypted laptop while it was open as he was working at a public library in San Francisco, California. The authorities were able to access everything on his computer, including incriminating information regarding the operations of the site.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Drug use is represented equally across all racial groups, as Michelle Alexander writes in the New Jim Crow.10 However, while poor communities and communities of color are surveilled aggressively to enforce compliance with drug laws, the technology elites who build the surveillance systems seem to be free from scrutiny. Silk Road, an eBay-like marketplace for drugs, flourished openly online from 2011 to 2013. After its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to prison, others stepped in to fill the gap. Alex Hern wrote in the Guardian in 2014: “DarkMarket, a system aiming to create a decentralised alternative to online drugs marketplace Silk Road, has rebranded as ‘OpenBazaar’ to improve its image online. OpenBazaar exists as little more than a proof of concept: the plan was sketched out by a group of hackers in Toronto in mid-April, where they won the $20,000 first prize for their idea.”11 Two years later, an entrepreneur named Brian Hoffman took the OpenBazaar code, commercialized it, and got a $3 million investment from venture capital firms Union Square Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz to run the marketplace using Bitcoin, an alternative digital currency.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Bluffing his way onto a flight, he gets to Auckland, New Zealand, where he picks up a “Billabong” surfers’ tee shirt that he still occasionally wears as a gesture of rakish defiance. He ends up safely in London, where he remains. For Craig—a man on the lam for years; harried by the Australian Tax Office for a reported bitcoin hoard; charged with “dark net” affiliations, from the mob in Latin America to Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts” of Silk Road; juggling several near-bankrupt companies that received as much as fifty-four million Australian dollars in public money—being wrong is just the beginning of being Wright of bitcoin. With the price of bitcoin passing eighteen thousand dollars on the way to revisiting six thousand, many assume that he is rich.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

As Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, founder of a new cryptocurrency called Zcash, explains, it’s all about ensuring a currency’s “fungibility”—the principle that “if you’re going to pay someone with something, and you have two of them, it doesn’t matter which one you give them.” In other words, every dollar, or yen, or pound is worth the same regardless of the serial number on the relevant banknote. This isn’t always the case with bitcoin. When the FBI auctioned the 144,000 bitcoins (worth $1.4 billion as of late November 2017) that it seized from Ross Ulbricht, the convicted mastermind of the Silk Road illicit goods marketplace, those coins fetched a significantly higher price than others in the market. The notion was that they had now been “whitewashed” by the U.S. government. In comparison, other bitcoins with a potentially shady past should be worth less because of the risk of future seizure.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Louis Fed, “Federal Funds Effective Rate,” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS. 8 Jail time: Wikipedia, “Kareem Serageldin,” last modified October, 5, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kareem_Serageldin. 8 Bitcoin white paper: Satoshi Yakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 9 cryptographer David Chaum: “Blind signatures for untraceable payments,” Springer-Verlag, 1982, https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Chaum-blind-signatures.pdf. 12 DigiCash: Wikipedia, “DigiCash,” last modified March 14, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash. 12 eGold: Kim Zetter, “Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold,” Wired, June 9, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/06/e-gold/. 13 Liberty Reserve: press release, “Founder of Liberty Reserve Pleads Guilty to Laundering More Than $250 Million Through His Digital Currency Business,” US Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-pleads-guilty-laundering-more-250-million-through-his-digital. 13 Bitcoins were used to pay for two pizzas: Rufas Kamau, “What Is Bitcoin Pizza Day, and Why Does The Community Celebrate on May 22?,” Forbes, May 9, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rufaskamau/2022/05/09/what-is-bitcoin-pizza-day-and-why-does-the-community-celebrate-on-may-22/?sh=1fab3817fd68. 14 Silk Road: Benjamin Weiser, “Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Website, Is Sentenced to Life in Prison,” New York Times, May 29, 2015. 17 “Naturally occurring Ponzi schemes”: Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 70. 18 Kindleberger: Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 7th edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 29. 19 Doesn’t scale: Kyle Croman et al., “On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains: (A Position Paper),” Financial Cryptography and Data Security (Springer, 2016), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9604, pp. 106–125. 19 Visa: Visa, “Security and Reliability,” https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/retail.html. 19 Argentina: Christina Criddle, “Bitcoin consumes ‘more electricity than Argentina,’ ” BBC.com, February 10, 2021. 22 Dan Davies: Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World (Scribner, 2018), p. 260. 23 “minor celebrity”: Shiller, Narrative Economics, Preface, xii. 24 an article for the New Republic: Jacob Silverman, “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam,” New Republic, June 7, 2021.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Paul Bradbury from the website Total Croatia News, sitting next to me all morning, said it was one of the most peculiar things he’d ever seen and wrote an article about it all called ‘Liberland conference: Reflections on a weekend in Alice in LiberWonderLand’. 13. He gives a lot of money to various libertarian causes, including offering US senator Bernie Sanders $100,000 to debate with him about socialism versus libertarianism. More controversially he donates money to a fund set up to help Ross Ulbricht, the man who founded the notorious darknet market, the Silk Road. 14. Back in the 1990s Timothy May imagined a world where virtual regions called ‘cybersteads’, protected by powerful encryption, could be created online, leaving individuals free to make consensual economic arrangements among themselves with no state at all—a world of online communities of interest interacting directly with each other, as the ‘meat world’ of mediocre, inefficient governments watched helplessly on the side.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

As long as it existed, people would trust and invest in Tor, and work around any tactics the authorities invent. Taking down Silk Road would hurt Tor's growth and future badly. In theory, a Deep website like Silk Road cannot be found and shut down by the authorities. However in October 2013, the FBI arrested its operator, Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", and seized the Silk Road servers. The first death of Silk Road -- for I'm sure it will be resurrected -- and subsequent worldwide prosecution of dealers who used it puts a large question mark over Tor. The FBI's explanations of how they tracked Ulbricht through his clumsy on-line activity smells of "parallel construction", aka "intelligence laundering," and the NSA's handy set of Internet spy tools.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

He led the investigation into Silk Road, the black-market bazaar where illegal goods and services were anonymously bought and sold. As part of a sprawling investigation into the dark web marketplace, law enforcement located six of Silk Road’s servers scattered across the globe and compromised the site before shutting it down in October 2013. Ross Ulbricht, of San Francisco, was later found guilty on narcotics and hacking charges for his role in creating and operating the site. He is serving two life sentences plus forty years in prison. Milan was nominated for the FBI Director’s Award for Investigative Excellence; he became a Cyber Division unit chief, advising on technology strategy.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

There might be legal hurdles—law enforcement might have to get a warrant, or might be stymied by jurisdictional issues because the information is in another country—but there are no technical hurdles. Sometimes, attribution is difficult but still possible. Even people who deliberately take pains to hide their identity find that they slip up. Ross Ulbricht was “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the American man behind the Silk Road e-commerce site for illegal goods and services. He was found by a dogged FBI agent who pieced together a years-old chat room post, an old e-mail address, and a chance interview with FBI agents investigating something else. Pedophiles have been arrested after being identified from background details in photos: a camping spot in Minnesota, a blurry logo on a sweatshirt, or a package of potato chips.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Then again, with the price of Bitcoin where it is in May 2021, as I put finishing touches to the book, perhaps my time would have been better spent in the past few years acquiring some bitcoin rather than laboring on this book. The Dark Side of Bitcoin In 2011, Dread Pirate Roberts, the digital pseudonym of a Texan named Ross Ulbricht, set up an online marketplace called the Silk Road. Ulbricht was a technology buff and a self-proclaimed Libertarian. His LinkedIn profile declared his intention to use “economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression [sic] amongst mankind” and to build an “economic simulation” that would let people see what it was like to live in a world without the “systemic use of force.”


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

The Feds obtained the cooperation of all those who were to be “whacked” and took staged photographs of the alleged victims covered in fake blood and wearing the ashen face makeup of a dead body that they forwarded to DPR as the proof of killings he demanded. Who was this criminal mastermind behind Silk Road? Not at all whom you would expect. Ross Ulbricht was the kind of kid any parent would be proud of, an Eagle Scout from Austin, Texas, who had earned a master’s degree in science and engineering. In grad school, Ulbricht eventually lost interest in science in favor of a new passion for libertarianism. He wrote on his LinkedIn profile that he now wished to “use economic theory to abolish the widespread and systemic use of force by institutions and government against mankind.”