Both were obvious astroturfing efforts to promote the Silk Road: 
 
 "Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?"  The owner of the underground drug market Silk Road was a 29-year-old Libertarian engineer living in San Francisco raking in over $80 million in 2 years, according to the indictment revealed today. Undercover buys 
 
 The charges were the result of an investigation during which law-enforcement officials made more than 100 undercover purchases of drugs from Silk Road vendors from 10 countries, authorities said. The indictment lays out a detailed account of how Silk Road grew and how FBI agent Christopher Tarbell took it down. Users could only access Silk Road using the Tor network - technology that was first developed by the U.S. Navy and conceals communications. $1.2 billion in sales 
 
 Over the past two years, Silk Road had been used by "several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors" to sell "hundreds of kilograms" of illegal drugs, generating the Bitcoin equivalent of $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions, Tarbell wrote. At one point, Ulbricht hid behind the username "altoid" to marvel about Silk Road, describing it as an "anonymous Amazon.com," investigators said. The user, FriendlyChemist, told Ulbricht—whose alleged online persona was "Dread Pirate Roberts," or DPR, a reference to the film The Princess Bride—that he had obtained a list of thousands of Silk Road users and was going to release them unless DPR paid off his $500,000 debt to another user, RedandWhite. "In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed," DPR wrote. Ulbricht was again given a picture of the purportedly dead victim, a resident of British Columbia, but there were no reports of anyone having been killed there, the FBI said.
– Alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht was no ordinary drug boss—he paid $1,000 a month for a San Francisco apartment he shared with two roommates, used an alias from the Princess Bride, and was arrested in the sci-fi section of his public library. But the FBI says the 29-year-old not only raked in around $80 million from his online drug marketplace's $1.6 billion turnover over two years, he ordered at least two killings to protect his operation, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The FBI says Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts," was provided with a photo of the supposed victim in one killing he ordered but there's no indication the killing actually took place. The other hit man he tried to hire was an undercover agent. Ulbricht, a Texas native, appears to be a "normal, nerdy guy" in his social media postings, Gawker finds. He went to grad school at Pennsylvania State University, where he studied solar cells. On his LinkedIn profile, he complained about government control and said his goals had changed after graduation. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort," he wrote. "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."