Christopher Wilton-Steer A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2025, Page 22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Up Close / ‘The Silk Road,’ by Christopher Wilton-Steer.

Silk Road 2.0 took a roughly 8 percent cut of every transaction, so he was making as much as $500,000 a month, part of which he used to pay a dozen anonymous users to help him with customer service.

But the site was notorious for selling vast swathes of drugs.) Ulbricht created the Silk Road site, accessible only using specific software that could connect to the dark web, in January 2011.