After the Capitol riots, Donald Trump pardoned a few hours after his inauguration Ross Ulbrichtthe creator of the illegal site “Silk Road”. The 40-year-old man had been serving a life sentence since 2015 for drug trafficking and illegal business operations.
“I have just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in her honor and that of the libertarian movement, which has supported me so ardently, I have the pleasure of signing a total and unconditional pardon for her son “, declared the new American president on his social network Truth Social. “The scum who worked to convict him are some of the same crazy people who participated in the government’s modern weaponization against me,” he added.
Silk Road, launched in 2011, was a darknet black market that used Bitcoin to facilitate transactions of illegal goods, including narcotics. The site still prohibited the resale of stolen credit cards or even child pornography images. The sale of arms was also quickly suspended.
Promise
Arrested in 2013, at not even 30 years old, Ross Ulbricht had amassed a fortune of 18 million dollars with his clandestine platform. He was convicted in 2015 after being accused of facilitating the trade of at least $200 million worth of drugs and of having ordered five assassinations in his entourage, to protect the secrecy surrounding the site’s transactions. . However, no evidence has established that these murders took place.
-Ulbricht had become, despite himself, a symbol of the fight for freedom on the Internet. The American’s sentence was thus considered by many to be disproportionate and unfair. According to him, he had only created a marketplace aimed at promoting a free market, based on libertarian principles, where buyers and sellers could meet without moderation of the goods or services exchanged. The release of Ulbricht was also a promise from Trump, made on Saturday May 25, 2024 before the convention of the Libertarian Party, a marginal movement which advocates individual freedoms and a minimal role for the government.
Trump’s decision was also widely applauded by the cryptocurrency community. Not least because Silk Road played a major role in the early adoption of Bitcoin. The platform showed the world that cryptocurrency could be used for anonymous (but not untraceable) transactions, although Bitcoin also suffers from a reputation for being used for illegal transactions.
Since the announcement of Trump’s election, Bitcoin has never done so well. A few hours before the inauguration of Donald Trump, who is expected to relax regulations on the sector once he returns to the White House, Bitcoin broke its record on Monday, exceeding the $109,000 mark. As a reminder, at the time of the closure of Silk Road, the American authorities had seized around 174,000 BTC, since partly sold at auction. At current prices, the seizure would be worth more than 17 billion euros.
