section_path: Silk Road
section_name: Silk Road
paragraph_text: Silk Road
  
  Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to Dallas, leaving Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself. Around this time, Ulbricht began planning Silk Road (initially called Underground Brokers). In his personal diary, he outlined his idea for a website "where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them". Ulbricht's ex-girlfriend said, "I remember when he had the idea... He said something about... the Silk Road in Asia... and what a big network it was... And that's what he wanted to create, so he thought it was the perfect name." Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road on his public LinkedIn page, where he discussed his wish to "use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind" and claimed, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
  
  Silk Road ran as an onion service on the Tor network, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination Internet Protocol addresses. By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ulbricht could conceal the server's IP address and, thus, its location. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was used for transactions on the site. While all bitcoin transactions were recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain, users who avoided linking their legal names to their cryptocurrency wallets were able to conduct transactions with considerable anonymity. Ulbricht used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" username for Silk Road, although it is disputed whether only he used that account. He attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III.
  
  Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to Dallas, leaving Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself. Around this time, Ulbricht began planning Silk Road (initially called Underground Brokers). In his personal diary, he outlined his idea for a website "where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them". Ulbricht's ex-girlfriend said, "I remember when he had the idea... He said something about... the Silk Road in Asia... and what a big network it was... And that's what he wanted to create, so he thought it was the perfect name." Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road on his public LinkedIn page, where he discussed his wish to "use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind" and claimed, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
  
  Silk Road ran as an onion service on the Tor network, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination Internet Protocol addresses. By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ulbricht could conceal the server's IP address and, thus, its location. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was used for transactions on the site. While all bitcoin transactions were recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain, users who avoided linking their legal names to their cryptocurrency wallets were able to conduct transactions with considerable anonymity. Ulbricht used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" username for Silk Road, although it is disputed whether only he used that account. He attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III.