Quote:

By late March 2011, Silk Road had ditched Freedom Hosting altogether, evidence shows.

To kickstart the site, the alleged would-be drug entrepreneur grew ten pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an isolated country cabin, according to his journal.

As a result, Ulbricht came within a “hair’s breadth of being arrested,” he wrote, and “would never repeat” the experience.

Still, he came out on the other side not only with his freedom but also with ten pounds of “high quality shrooms.”

Shrooms in hand, Ulbricht allegedly began advertising on various forums around the Web. This is one of the points at which authorities were able to connect Ulbricht's name to Silk Road. Famously, his apparent mistake included using a Gmail address with his first and last names in it, which was connected to Silk Road ads.

The FBI wouldn't find that connection for years, however, and within a few days of advertising the site, Ulbricht allegedly made his first shroom sale—an exhilarating experience, he wrote in his journal.

More sales came in the next week, evidence shows, and he allegedly soon had customers buying as much as a quarter-pound of shrooms in a single purchase.

The journal he began to keep in 2011 was written because “someone might write the story of my life one day.” While he was teaching new customers and vendors how to stay secure on the Internet, the alleged owner of Silk Road apparently made it easy for police to eventually reconstruct his every step in the creation of the site..

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we all know the post he made here basically advertising Silk Road but it would seem as though he probably used the grow info from the shroomery to learn to grow 10lbs of shrooms to sell to get the $ to kickstart SR, then advertise back on here 


that is if the source is solid

http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2t8wib/dprs_mentor_and_biggest_influencer_variety_jones/



EDIT: Straight from the pages of Ulbrichts journal

Quote:

While all of this was happening, I began working on a project that had been in my mind for over a year. I was calling it Underground Brokers, but eventually settled on Silk Road. The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could that could lead back to them. I had been studying the technology for a while, but needed a business model and strategy. I finally decided that I would produce mushrooms so that I could list them on the site for cheap to get people interested. I worked my ass off setting up a lab in a cabin near Bastrop off the grid. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea and I would never repeat it, but I did it and produced several kilos of high quality shrooms.

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