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Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Claims Head Of Mt. Gox Was The Real Dread Pirate Roberts

John Biggs

If you read the headline above and said “Huh?” then you are not alone. It seems Ross Ulbricht, the alleged head of Silk Road, was not the real owner of the site. According to Ulbricht’s attorney, the creator was one Mark Karpeles, the disgraced head of Mt. Gox, an exchange that imploded theatrically in February.

Motherboard has a reporter at the trail who noted that Ulbricht smiled when he finally made the admission.

”We have the name of the real mastermind and it’s not Ulbricht,” Joshua Dratel, Ulbricht’s lawyer, said in court today. He plans to argue that Karpeles framed Ulbricht.”[Silk Road] would be a device for leveraging the value of Bitcoin, and if he could create a site independent of Bitcoin, you could control the value of Bitcoin,” Dratel said, reading from [DHS Agent Jared] DerYeghiayan’s emails.

DerYeghiayan believed his evidence was so strong that he even drafted a search warrant for Karpeles’s email in May of 2013.

The trial is currently adjourned by Judge Katherine Forrest, who said “The defense has been building a picture all afternoon that Karpeles was Dread Pirate Roberts or a Dread Pirate Roberts. That has come out in spades, that that is their argument. That cat is out of the bag.”

Bitcoin has always been controlled by a very small cabal and this was even truer in the heyday of the Silk Road. But that Karpeles, the bumbling CEO of a completely imploded exchange the head of a drug den? It sounds far too good to be true and should make the Ulbricht trial far more interesting.

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John Biggs
John Biggs is a writer, consultant, programmer, former East Coast Editor and current contributing writer for TechCrunch. He writes mainly about technology, cryptocurrency, security, gadgets, gear, wristwatches, and the internet. After spending his formative years as a programmer, he switched his profession and became a full-time entrepreneur andwriter. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Laptop, PC Upgrade, Surge, Gizmodo, Men’s Health, InSync, Linux Journal, Popular Science, Sync, and he has written a book called Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age.
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