Now the case is over and Ross Ulbricht is behind bars, Wired Magazine has dug deep into how a 29yr old idealist built a global drug bazaar and used bitcoin as the payment mechanism. As one commentator said "it's like a season of breaking bad with loads of tech".
The fact was, Green wasn’t just your average Mormon grandpa. Over the past few months he had been handling customer service for the massive online enterprise called Silk Road. It was like a clandestine eBay, a digital marketplace for illicit trade, mostly drugs. Green, under the handle Chronicpain, had parlayed his extensive personal narcotics knowledge—he’d been on pain meds for years—into a paying gig working for the site.