On January 21, 2025, former President Trump granted a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a Tor-based marketplace for illegal drugs using bitcoin. Ulbricht had been sentenced in 2015 to two life terms plus 40 years after the FBI seized his open laptop in a San Francisco library. Launched in 2011, Silk Road was an anonymous online marketplace accessible via Tor and powered by bitcoin, which was then still largely experimental and little known. Ross Ulbricht, using the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” envisioned it as a libertarian experiment—a marketplace free from government oversight, where transactions were voluntary and nonviolent. However, Silk Road quickly gained notoriety as a symbol of the dark web. At its height, it facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drug sales and became a major focus for law enforcement trying to navigate and control online anonymity. In 2013, the FBI arrested Ulbricht in a San Francisco public library, using agents to discreetly distract him while accessing his laptop while it was unlocked. Ulbricht’s 2015 conviction and sentence of two life terms plus 40 years sparked widespread debate. Critics called it disproportionately harsh compared to similar crimes, while supporters argued it was necessary to deter future darknet markets. During the investigation, the FBI also seized nearly 144,000 bitcoins connected to Silk Road—at the time, one of the largest cryptocurrency confiscations in history.(Historic Vids)