Silk Road, the notorious online drug marketplace, was the brainchild of Ross Ulbricht, who in 2011, launched the site on the Tor network, using bitcoin as currency. It was a completely anonymous way to procure all manner of contraband and an ingenious use of darknet encryption. It was also incredibly profitable (last year, the U.S. seized one billion dollars in cryptocurrency connected to the site), until the FBI took it down and arrested Ulbricht in 2013.
These events have been widely reported online and in Alex Winter’s sympathetic 2015 doc
Deep Web, and now we have a drama based on Ulbricht’s rise and fall.