A young Texan known as Dread Pirate Roberts (real name: Ross Ulbricht) built Silk
Road on three then - new technologies: cheap cloud data storage; the Tor browser, which let
people roam
dark parts of the Internet undetected; and Bitcoin, which let them pay each other in a secure, semi-anonymous manner, without involving banks.
However, Shrem later plead guilty in 2015
on the charge of dealing with Robert Faiella, who supplied $ 1m in bitcoins to
people seeking to buy drugs
on the now - seized
dark - web site Silk
Road.