Ross Ulbricht was born in 1984 in Austin, Texas, and based the Silk Highway in 2013, a infamous darkish net market that facilitated unlawful actions resembling drug trafficking by Bitcoin transactions. Through the investigation, the FBI seized 144,336 Bitcoin from a shared digital pockets on his laptop computer, promoting them by a collection of auctions that generated roughly $48.2 million.
In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted of a number of crimes, together with cash laundering, laptop hacking, and narcotics trafficking. He’s at the moment serving a double life sentence (50 years) plus a further 40 years, totaling 1080 months, with out the opportunity of parole.
Many crypto fanatics have advocated for his launch, together with former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who promised during the Bitcoin conference earlier this year that he would commute his sentence if elected again.