The FBI said the infamous site generated 9.5 million Bitcoins in sales, or the equivalent of about $1.2 billion. It also made about $80 million in sales commissions. The Federal Bureau also alleged that Ulbricht earned $20,000 in Bitcoin commissions from sales on Silk Road per day, and made $3.4 million in total, as reported in Business Insider.

Before Ulbricht allegedly built Silk Road, he was an engineer, studying solar cells as a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. And later in one of his Google+ post he said, “Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.” The Silk Road was, in many ways, the quintessence of free market economics. Because it was completely encrypted and completely anonymous, used Bitcoin - an uncrackable "cryptocurrency" - it stood outside any government regulation at all, including the criminal law.

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