I don’t remember where I first heard about the Silk Road or Bitcoin. What I remember is that my college buddies and I were in Ann Arbor for the summer in 2012, and we wanted to drop acid for the second time.
Our prior hook up was gone, and rumors abounded of this mysterious site where you could order anything online. The Silk Road was an elegant site, not hard to find or use—though your goods might not show up.
I was the tech savvy one, having practically grown up on 4chan. It didn’t take me long to download the Tor browser and find the hidden wiki, the site that linked you to all the other dark web sites.
The Tor browser isn’t that complicated for users. It’s basically a Firefox browser with an add-on that allows you to view Tor sites. The Tor network is a separate network protocol from the standard internet, encrypted and untraceable. It was created by the government as an open-source encrypted networking protocol by the Naval Research Laboratory in 2004. You can draw your own conclusions there.
The Tor browser felt like any other browser. The real difference was, no Google. No search at all, for that matter. That’s really why they call it the dark web. Websites don’t have names in their Tor addresses, they’re all long strings of random letters and numbers. You have to know the address of the site to access it.
I found the Tor address of the hidden wiki, the unofficial homepage of the dark web, on 4chan. Links to dozens of sites. Some innocuous, some horrible. I didn’t click around to see. One claimed “hitman services for hire.” The bottom of the internet. Only took me 10 minutes to find.
Many of them, it turns out, were fake, or secret law enforcement operations. There’s an old 4chan story about a suicidal anon ordering a hit on himself through a dark web site. He said, I don’t want to live anymore, but I’m too scared to kill myself, just shoot me when I don’t suspect it. He received a message from some embarrassed federal agents returning his money and referring him to a suicide hotline. Grim stuff.
Scrolled down the list, and there it was—the Silk Road. A white homepage, green links, the famous camel logo. A marketplace, plain and simple, but with no regard for legality. The categories on the left listed art, books, electronics, jewelry, forgeries. Drugs, with dozens of subcategories for cannabis, opioids, stimulants, psychedelics, anything you wanted. That was the most popular category, with thousands of listings.
We wanted LSD. Damn hippies. One problem, we needed Bitcoin to pay. What on earth was Bitcoin, and how could we even buy it?
These were early primitive days. You couldn’t just make a Coinbase account and use a credit card. Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based crypto exchange, was the only game in town. I made an account. You couldn’t use a credit card on Mt. Gox either—you had to wire them the funds directly using Moneygram, something I’d never heard of. Time to hit the ATM. My buddy handed me his share of the cash.
The instructions online told me to go to the CVS on State St., pick up a special red telephone, input some numbers from my Mt. Gox account, and get a receipt. It all seemed highly suspicious—strange telephones, cash money orders—but we only needed 7 Bitcoins for the transaction. That was $77 at the time, with BTC at a hefty $11/coin. Seemed like a small risk for potentially tripping our balls off.
I followed the directions, used the red telephone, got a receipt, and handed my cash to the CVS clerk. I had Bitcoin in my Mt. Gox account within a few hours. No big deal. My Silk Road account had an address, and I sent the Bitcoin there. An hour for the transfer, and there it was.
We found a seller. He had great reviews! People liked his LSD. They said they’d tested it and it was legit. His tabs were plain, if I recall, pink or purple or something. Other sellers sold tabs with the Silk Road logo on them. At any rate, five star ratings! We placed our order.
One question on our mind: How do we know we won’t get stiffed? What’s to stop the seller, a drug dealer, from just taking the funds and never delivering?
The Silk Road had a clever answer for this. An escrow system. When you placed an order, the funds were held by the site until you confirmed the delivery. If the goods never showed up, you got your money back. This favored the buyers, but listen, the founder was American after all. The customer is always right.
Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts.” The recent beneficiary of a full and unconditional pardon from President Trump, after serving 11 years in prison for his role as founder of the Silk Road. Handed a life sentence in the Obama years, which many claim was unfair and politically motivated. Ross became a cause celebre for libertarians in recent years, and they got him out. Winning elections has benefits, don’t you know.
Given the illegality of our transaction, we were nervous, of course. Six acid tabs were on their way in the mail. Not exactly legal! Naturally we used a fake name, but our own address. We lived in the student ghetto of a college town and figured it wouldn’t matter.
Days went by, then a week. We waited nervously. The shipment never came. I checked the site, and the seller was gone too. Profile vanished. I clicked on the order page, said my shipment never came, and the Bitcoin returned to my wallet.
We were spooked. Too spooked to try again. We didn’t know whether the guy had been caught, our shipment seized, or if he’d just ditched the site altogether. Too stressful, not worth the risk. Besides, another buddy was coming with mushrooms the next week anyways.
I downloaded a BTC wallet program to my Macbook and transferred the funds there. Hell, even in 2012, I knew better than to hold my Bitcoin on an exchange (Mt. Gox famously went bankrupt, with all Bitcoin seized, in 2014).
These wallets were archaic though. Every time you booted it up, it downloaded the entire Bitcoin blockchain to verify! It took hours. I had to let my Macbook run overnight the first time.
We forgot all about it. Until the fall of 2013, that is. My buddy rushed into my room excitedly. “Dude, have you looked at Bitcoin?” he asked. It was over $200 a coin! We were rich. We sold it immediately.
We had $1,400 between us. A princely sum for broke college students who didn’t have a hundred bucks between them. We bought liquor and a quarter pound of weed and threw a party that weekend. We all got laid. I think we did, at least. My memory of those years often escapes me. In my mind, that was the party where we all got laid.
Bitcoin now stands at nearly $100,000 per coin. I have no regrets. In all honesty, I’d trade my share of that $700k just to relive that party.
Maybe we should have kept a few coins, though, just for old times sake.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
