“… The Silk Road site was set up by Ulbricht in 2011 on the dark web, a part of the internet that's inaccessible to traditional search engines. It did not accept cash or credit cards; users had to pay with cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. All transactions were encrypted and hence untraceable.
It became a place for people to buy and sell illicit drugs, weapons, poisons, and services such as computer hacking.
…
"Silk Road was the Amazon of drug sites," former FBI Special Agent Milan Patel
said in an interview for the CBS News series
"FBI Declassified."
"We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, 'hey, pay me two bitcoin and I'll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband's email account,'" Patel said. "…It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it."
Ulbricht ran the site until his arrest in 2013, when it
was seized by the FBI. During his trial, prosecutors said at least six deaths were traced to overdoses from drugs bought on Silk Road. They alleged that Ulbricht collected $18 million through commissions on tens of thousands of drug sales, and
presented evidence alleging he sought to have people killed for threatening his business. …”
——
Trump has gone full supervillain.