January 23, 2025 - 2:00pm

There are two facts worth knowing about Ross Ulbricht. The first is that had he found an extra second at his arrest to slam down the lid of his laptop, his data would have self-erased and he would never have been jailed in the first place. The second is that if the FBI hadn’t sold his stash of Bitcoin at $334 apiece, he would today be a billionaire.

Now, in one of over 100 executive orders made at the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has pardoned Ulbricht, springing the Silk Road kingpin from the Arizona penitentiary where he’d spent a decade. “It’s crazy,” Trump remarked. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponisation of government against me.”

Trump has a special affinity for fellow anti-regime folk heroes — Julian Assange being an obvious case in point. And that is the status which Ulbricht somehow took on. Silk Road was the biggest online darknet marketplace of the early 2010s, its reign coinciding with the earliest years of Bitcoin. Once it was smashed, there was never again a one-stop shop for drug users chasing a score. Accordingly, the feds threw the book at its creator, pour encourager les autres.

But that alone doesn’t glean sympathy. Ulbricht’s status as a political prisoner instead came through his mildness, his desperately ordinary nature. Never mind the chatter about a murder-for-hire he was supposed to have ordered — a generation of Valley types, programmers and crypto enthusiasts looked at this hippyish Ph.D candidate and decided that they might have taken the same course of action.

The campaign to free Ulbricht must now rank among history’s greatest PR coups. Friends and relatives applied sustained lobbying pressure, to the extent of receiving an endorsement from former Bill Clinton special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Gradually, they knitted together a broader coalition of libertarians, Bitcoin enthusiasts, and chronic dissidents to call for his release.

That twinning of Ulbricht’s story with the “community” of Bitcoin proved a masterstroke. Trump, who once described Bitcoin as “a scam”, has lately rowed in full bore behind it. Indeed, one of his first acts in office was to mint his own memecoin, just as his wife Melania minted hers via a separate LLC.

On the campaign trail, Trump aggressively courted the crypto community, vowing to reverse Joe Biden’s regulatory oversights following the case of fellow white-collar criminal Sam Bankman-Fried. He promised America would become a world leader in crypto, and markets are betting that he will establish a Fed-style national reserve of Bitcoin by 2027.

What was in it for Trump? A master of branding, a giver of his name to everything from hotels to steaks to universities, he saw here an opportunity to boost his portfolio. And as a market-maker with the loudest megaphone in the world, Trump recognised an opportunity to play in a still wildly unregulated space. There is no such thing as “insider trading” on crypto exchanges. There is no such thing as “pump ’n’ dump”. As the Trump coin’s branding makes plain, it “should not be considered an investment”.

Here, in an esoteric edgeworld, a form of gambling based on the children’s game of Hot Potato is taking off. Winners are made; fortunes cohere, then are lost. The point is to be on the inside track. Two years ago, Elon Musk spent weeks on X pumping his energy into a memecoin called Dogecoin, based on a comic internet meme dog. Thanks almost entirely to his efforts, the coin went from fractions of a penny to a price last listed as 28p. It is extremely probable that Musk made a killing, but no financial regulator needs to know or could be enticed to care.

The Elon set is now Trump’s set, and from Marc Andreessen to Mark Zuckerberg, the Valley crew’s ideas for reshaping society always seem to end with another line of code on another server. Of course, the paradox is that at the same moment that Trump toys with sending Navy Seals into Mexico to shoot Sinaloa gangsters for selling fentanyl, he has turned the key on the man who made opioids accessible in the smallest of small towns. But this is not an administration much given to reconciling paradoxes. The sword cuts. The knot breaks. The game moves on.


Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes