the Silk Road
loredark webcryptography
The Tor-hidden marketplace, 2011 to 2013, whose rise and takedown defined the public's picture of the dark web.
Launched in early 2011 and run under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road paired Tor hidden services with bitcoin escrow and grew into the era's largest illegal marketplace before the FBI seized it in October 2013, arresting founder Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library. Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life; he was pardoned in January 2025. For security education the case is the reference on how anonymity systems fail in practice: not the cryptography, but operational mistakes, early forum posts, and a captured laptop, open and logged in.
Also known as: Dread Pirate Roberts