exam and was unable to find a buyer for his seasteading gaming simulation. For all his lofty ambitions, he felt like a failure. “When Ross Ulbricht created the Silk Road, a clandestine online drug bazaar hidden on the deep web, he was a 26-year-old libertarian idealist living in Austin, Tex., talking his girlfriend’s ear off about Austrian economics and seasteading experiments - the idea of creating communities in the middle of the sea, free from government regulations. It tells the tale of the rise and fall of the Dread Pirate Roberts. And that is what happened with Bitcoin and The Silk Road.I read American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road. These “edgy” use cases prove out the technology, provide an initial user base, and lead to more mainstream adoption down the road. And such was the case with Bitcoin and crypto. Many technologies that ultimately find mainstream use cases (the web browser, the VHS, etc) find initial product market fit in areas that are edgy at best. This has led to a narrative around Bitcoin and crypto that it is shady and only useful for illicit behavior. A much smaller percentage of them recirculated back and forth between customers and suppliers in the market.īut I have always believed that The Silk Road was where Bitcoin first found a massive use case and it was where many people first bought and used Bitcoin. That does not mean that all of the bitcoins that had been mined at that time were in use on The Silk Road. Those 9.5mm bitcoins, which certainly recirculated a fair bit, represented roughly all of the circulating supply of Bitcoin at that time. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin exchange rates…”, according to the September 2013 complaint, and involved 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors (marketplace) The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. It reminded me that The Silk Road was the original product market fit for Bitcoin. It is a fascinating story with many angles drug and arms dealing, entrepreneurship, criminal investigation, and much more. It is the story of Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts), the founder and owner of The Silk Road.

I read my friend Nick Bilton‘s book American Kingpin over the last few weeks.

American kingpin silk road