holy crap the madman actually did it president Trump on his first day in office kept his promise to Pardon Ross olrick who has been serving a life sentence in federal prison for creating the Silk Road now in case you didn't know the Silk Road was basically the OG hidden Marketplace on tour there were technically other ones that came before it but the Silk Road had a lot of its success and gained a lot of notoriety for being the first hidden Marketplace to use Bitcoin as the only form of payment because Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency
and back in 2011 when the Silk Road was founded there was virtually no kyc regulations or really any regulations at all around Bitcoin because that project itself had just started a few years ago hardly anyone cared about it because a single Bitcoin is worth less than a dollar but because of its open source and decentralized nature Ross H brick saw it as the perfect tool to combine with tor's onion service feature which lets you host a website on the dark web anonymously Donald Trump announced on Truth social that he had just called the mother of
Ross William Alber to let her know that in honor of her and the libertarian movement which supported me so strongly it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son Ross the scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me he was given two life sentences plus 40 years ridiculous and I absolutely agree because in case you didn't know about the legend of the Silk Road it started because Ross olrick had what I guess you could
call a Libertarian vision of Unstoppable unregulated online marketplaces and his vision has largely succeeded because even though he got the book thrown at him with a lifetime prison sentence that hasn't stopped others from creating these online black markets there's easily been a hundred more that have popped up over the years following the same fundamentals as the Silk Road and of course making improvements along the way like switching to Monero as the standard cryptocurrency and requiring the use of pgp whenever possible and many of these markets have gone through successful life cycles where they opened up
they gained popularity over time they gained a number of sellers and buyers that wanted to do business through their website and use their escro service and then after a few years the administrators shut down the website retiring as crypto millionaires on a yacht somewhere and the success rates of these websites are getting higher and higher Grant granted there's still a lot of them that get seized especially when the websites get really popular and the admins refuse to retire and just get too cocky and keep going and going and when most admins actually do choose to
quit on their own terms they end up exit scamming which is basically where they'll freeze all the crypto that's in their escro service that the buyers and sellers were using and sometimes they'll even try to milk people a little bit by telling them hey everything's fine man there's just a small problem with the withdrawal system but everything else is working and I'm totally going to fix it just keep on depositing your crypto and then of course the admins disappear with everything and they shut the website down which is pretty scummy and it hurts people's trust
in these kinds of marketplaces this little social experiment that Ross Brook started but at the end of the day that's the risk that you're going to take with the dark web and fortunately there's forums now like Dread that stay pretty up to date with hidden marketplaces and dark web news so when those particular ones do start doing an exit scam or they get hacked or they get raided you're going to find out there pretty quickly so yeah the US government basically realized after they caught Ross in a sting operation at a library and took the
laptop that he was running the Silk Road from that he had discovered something revolutionary he demonstrated that Bitcoin was the perfect tool as a med medium of Exchange in a truly unregulated Online Marketplace and without that demonstration which Ross unfortunately spent 10 years of his life in prison for Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto industry would not be what it is today and make no mistake because I see this come up all the time when people talk about Ross olrick especially when people say that he did nothing wrong he did not get in trouble
for trying to hire a hitman he never even talked to a Hitman there were no charges that were made against him if you look at his case and if you look into what really happened with Ross trying to hire a hitman he got LED on this crazy ruse by a scammer or a group of scammers who played a number of different roles there's friendly chemist who claimed to be this middleman supplier that got ripped off by someone named Lucy drop who was actually selling LSD on the Silk Road so friendly chem said that he had
fronted Lucy drops some product that he didn't pay for and he wanted Ross olrick to make it right because now friendly chemist owed money to his suppliers and he also claimed to know the identities of a bunch of vendors on the Silk Road and he threatened to release them if Ross who went by the name dread pirate Roberts didn't do something about the Lucy drop situation and get him his money Lucy drop came back onto the Silk Road a little bit later under a new name called real Lucy drop and he contacted Ross claiming to
have been in prison and that his original Lucy drop account that was scamming people basically taking orders and then not really shipping them the product that they ordered was stolen by his partner and he didn't have any way to pay back friendly chemist you know his partner stole the account stole all the money and stole all the product and during this conversation Ross requested that Lucy drop give him friendly chemist real life identity so that Ross could threaten him and have leverage against that blackmail threat that friendly chemist initially made against Ross now as the
conversation went on Lucy drop told Ross that friendly chemist was extremely frightened by the guys that he owed money to because they were the most powerful biker gang in Canada and he was saying that if he didn't get the money to pay off his suppliers that he would rather go to the police and get into to the witness protection program and turn rat than to face the wrath of this hell's angelesque biker gang that he owed money to a few days after this conversation a new character called red and white appears claiming to be a
highlevel member of this biker gang and he contacted Ross on the Silk Road claiming that he was the person that friendly chemist owed money to now at first this red and white person played the angle to make it sound like they just wanted Ross to pay them the money directly but after chatting for a bit the red and white person decided that they might just start selling on the Silk Road directly because they could do more than a million dollars per week in sales which would blow out the majority of the competition you got to
remember that selling drugs online was a very new thing at the time there were only a handful of people doing it and they certainly were not the big boss kingpens that had access to large quantities of of supply for very cheap and they also claimed to have found friendly chemist partner named Zen who had a lot of their product that they owed on him so after red and white took that product back and took care of Zen he said that he felt even meanwhile friendly chem was still messaging Rob saying that he needed $500,000 to
move his wife and kids away because this biker gang just unived his friend Zen he believed that he was next and if Ross didn't pay within 72 hours then he was going to leak all this information that he had about vendors and buyers that were on the Silk Road and turn rat so Ross asked friendly chemist for an extension to 96 hours and in the meantime he decided to contact this red and white guy that he had just met because surely a biker gang Kingpin knows some Hitmen so so red and white played the role
perfectly at first he was pretending to be a little hesitant at first and even kind of saying it's stupid because he had already killed Zin and so now he didn't really care about going after friendly chemist but then he admitted that yeah you know I do have Hitman working for me cuz of course I'm the hell angels of Canada and he could take care of the problem for about $150,000 so Ross ended up paying the money it was over 1,600 Bitcoin at the time red and white confirms the very next day that the problem has
been taken care of and he sends Ross a picture as proof but because Ross doesn't actually know what friendly chemist looks like red and white could have just sent a picture of any random dead guy that you can find on the internet okay it's not hard to come by that and I might actually make a video at some point about this whole Hitman scam because like I said it's something that a lot of people have a misunderstanding about with the dread pirate Roberts case he didn't get life in prison for killing anyone and certainly not
for even attempting to take a hit out on someone and because Ross ended up paying 1670 Bitcoins for that hit way back when it probably ended up being one of the most lucrative scams in history since that payment is worth almost $200 million today and that honestly should have been punishment enough for Ross olrick I'm glad that he's free and I'm glad he's going to get to see the wonderful dark web world that he pioneered if you enjoyed this video please like and share it to heck the algorithm and check out my website base. win
where you can get my awesome merch like the tie-dye Tor te or the little Damon hoodie and you can get accessories for your phone or laptop 10% storewide discount when you pay in Monero XMR a checkout have a great rest of your day