How buying drugs online became safe, easy, and boring: Silk Road is dead, but anonymous Internet sales of illegal substances are here to stay.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Cover story

Once upon a time, you could buy illegal drugs anonymously online from a site called Silk Road. The postman would show up at your door with your gas bill, maybe a birthday card from mom, and some carefully packaged pot or heroin. Even though you had never met the person you bought the drugs from, the delivery came just as you ordered it.

That's because the secretive "darknet" site that made this possible--before being shut down by the feds in late 2013--operated a lot like any other online commerce site. Silk Road's pages, like those at Amazon or Yelp, were dense with seller ratings and reviews, guiding buyers to vendors with good records and high-quality products. Boisterous online forums were a click away, jammed with customer-generated information about drugs, dealers, safety, and whatever else the anonymous technorati wanted to chat about.

From January 2011 to the beginning of October 2013, the FBI estimates, Silk Road facilitated 1.2 million drug deals, moving thousands of kilos of illegal substances and collecting nearly $80 million in commissions. Clients were "typically professionals in the 30- to 40-year-old range" who "want to be treated with respect," one Silk Road dealer named "Nod" told The Daily Dot in January. The site provided a safe haven not just from the state-sponsored violence of being arrested but from the street hassle of transacting with physical-world drug dealers.

Silk Road's 950,000 registered users were largely satisfied with their consumer experience. A May 2014 paper in the journal Addiction found that 89 percent of customers surveyed said they chose the site for its wide range of choices, 77 percent valued the higher quality of drugs available, and 69 percent preferred the convenience. A 2012 study by Nicolas Christin for Carnegie Mellon found that 96 percent of Silk Road sellers boasted a consumer rating of 5 out of 5.

None of that mattered to the FBI. By July 2013, after months of investigation, the bureau had located Silk Road's servers in Iceland. The Reykjavik Metropolitan Police seized the site's guts and handed over copies of the contents to their American colleagues. On October 2 of that year, the feds shut Silk Road down, keeping nearly 30,000 Bitcoin--worth around $3.7 million at the time, $13 million as this goes to press--that had been left in vendor and customer accounts.

In January 2015, a 30-year-old libertarian named Ross Ulbricht is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in New York for narcotics trafficking, running a "continuing criminal enterprise" of drug selling (known colloquially as the "drug kingpin" statute), computer hacking, and money laundering. The jury will be told that he also contracted hitmen to commit murder on his behalf, though he is not being charged with that crime in this trial. Ulbricht, who the feds accuse of launching and operating the site under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts" (or just "DPR"), faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

In the course of its war on Silk Road, the FBI has collared a handful of other defendants and shut down all activity at the site's original address. But the crackdown has done little to slow the growth of anonymous, encryption-enabled drug sales on the secret Internet.

Silk Road is dead. Long live Silk Road.

'We Lost a Community of People That Believed in Something'

Shopping on Silk Road was straightforward, but it required a certain amount of technical savvy. Would-be buyers downloaded and fired up the anonymizing software Tor (which, roughly speaking, routes signals so sites and visitors can't be traced back to their IP addresses). Thus cloaked, they could begin cruising the Dark Web. To make purchases, they had to obtain the digital currency Bitcoin, which can be a tedious process. Having jumped through these hoops, they could place an order with a Silk Road vendor, likely through an encrypted message that contained their shipping address.

Unlike the stuff you might get from a street dealer, Silk Road deliveries almost always came as advertised. An FBI report about the agency's undercover buys noted that "at least 56 samples of these purchases have been laboratory-tested, and, of these, 54 have shown high purity levels of the drug the item was advertised to be on Silk Road."

Drugs weren't all you could get on Silk Road, though they dominated the market. One 19-year-old user I interviewed only wanted a fake ID so she could drink alcohol. She found Silk Road far more appealing than dredging around her college town for a sketchy guy with an X-Acto knife and a laminating machine.

Though the purpose of the site was to facilitate illegal transactions, that doesn't mean it was a free-for-all. Administrators explicitly asked vendors--who paid a one-time fee in Bitcoin worth about $500 for the privilege of a maintaining an account--to "not list anything who's [sic] purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia." (For a few months in 2012 there was a sister site called Armory dedicated only to weapons, but it died from lack of buyer interest.)

Silk Road made money--and provided extra security--by functioning as the escrow between buyer and seller. On purchase, the buyer's money went into a Silk Road account; the buyer released the money after he received the goods, and Silk Road took a cut. The site also provided Bitcoin "tumblers" to muddy any digital record left by the Bitcoin blockchain, which would otherwise record all the details of a transaction from wallet to wallet (although individual wallet holders can be anonymous as well).

Though there wasn't a rigid, Fight Club-style ethos of omerta, users were strongly discouraged from discussing specific packaging methods anywhere that postal inspectors and cops might see. This included any unencrypted communication on Silk Road itself.

From talking to some Silk Road buyers and reading the public writings of users, it...