But maintaining a completely untraceable site was difficult. Ulbricht, like any coder, once asked for help from the coding community on Q&A site, “How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?” What Ulbricht didn't know is that by this time the FBI was watching his every move, according to the indictment. He also made the mistake of using his real name when making the post.

The FBI began its probe of Silk Road around January 2011. By the summer of 2013 they were conducting surveillance on Ulbricht directly. They also succeeded in locating the Silk Road server, even though it was supposedly secure, and copied it entirely - including all its user accounts and millions in Bitcoin wallets.

On October 2, the FBI finally shut down Silk Road and Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco.

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