{"id":20549,"date":"2025-01-21T23:12:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T00:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20549"},"modified":"2025-01-22T00:28:33","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T00:28:33","slug":"trump-pardons-ross-ulbricht-creator-of-silk-road-drug-marketplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20549","title":{"rendered":"Trump Pardons Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Drug Marketplace"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian worlds.<\/p>\n

In doing so, Mr. Trump fulfilled a promise that he made repeatedly on the campaign trail as he courted political contributions from the crypto industry, which spent more than $100 million<\/a> to influence the outcome of the election. A Bitcoin pioneer, Mr. Ulbricht, 40, was sentenced<\/a> to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015, after he was convicted on charges that included distributing narcotics on the internet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know,\u201d Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s name and making a reference to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. \u201cThe scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its nearly three years of existence, Silk Road, which operated in a shady corner of the internet known as the dark web, became an international drug marketplace, facilitating more than 1.5 million transactions, including sales of heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances. (The site generated over<\/a> $200 million in revenue, according to authorities.) In court, prosecutors claimed that Mr. Ulbricht had also solicited the murders of people whom he considered threats \u2014 but acknowledged<\/a> there was no evidence that the killings took place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite his crimes, Mr. Ulbricht has remained popular with crypto enthusiasts because Silk Road was one of the first venues where people used Bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For years, his supporters have argued that his sentence was overly punitive and adopted the slogan \u201cFree Ross\u201d online and at industry gatherings.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to argue that Ross Ulbricht wasn\u2019t the most successful and influential entrepreneur of the early Bitcoin era,\u201d said Pete Rizzo, an editor at the news publication Bitcoin Magazine. \u201cThis is the industry banding together and saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to reclaim our own.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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President Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian worlds.In doing so, Mr. Trump fulfilled a promise that he made repeatedly on the campaign trail as he courted political contributions from the crypto industry, which spent more than $100 million to influence the outcome of the election. A Bitcoin pioneer, Mr. Ulbricht, 40, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015, after he was convicted on charges that included distributing narcotics on the internet.\u201cI just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know,\u201d Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s name and making a reference to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. \u201cThe scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.\u201dIn its nearly three years of existence, Silk Road, which operated in a shady corner of the internet known as the dark web, became an international drug marketplace, facilitating more than 1.5 million transactions, including sales of heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances. (The site generated over $200 million in revenue, according to authorities.) In court, prosecutors claimed that Mr. Ulbricht had also solicited the murders of people whom he considered threats \u2014 but acknowledged there was no evidence that the killings took place.Despite his crimes, Mr. Ulbricht has remained popular with crypto enthusiasts because Silk Road was one of the first venues where people used Bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For years, his supporters have argued that his sentence was overly punitive and adopted the slogan \u201cFree Ross\u201d online and at industry gatherings.\u201cIt\u2019s hard to argue that Ross Ulbricht wasn\u2019t the most successful and influential entrepreneur of the early Bitcoin era,\u201d said Pete Rizzo, an editor at the news publication Bitcoin Magazine. \u201cThis is the industry banding together and saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to reclaim our own.\u2019\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20551,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20549"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20552,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549\/revisions\/20552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}