"Ulbricht denies all allegations. He is not the Dread Pirate Roberts"

"The prosecution insists off the bat that Ross Ulbricht = the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the Dread Pirate Roberts = Ross Ulbricht. The grand jury indictment is premised on that equation."

The Dread Pirate Roberts could not have picked a better pseudonym. The name is taken from a character in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (later made into a film in 1987)—a dastardly masked man in black who later turns out to be the female protagonist’s childhood sweetheart Westley in disguise. In the novel and the film, “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is itself a pseudonym without a stable identity. Westley inherits the name from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, who hands it over after retiring. The Dread Pirate Roberts is not so much a single individual as it is a persona, a reputation, a mask.

In the Silk Road case as well, there are rumors that the Dread Pirate Roberts was actually multiple people. It remains to be seen what the Ulbricht defense’s exact theory of the case is, or whether they will completely flesh out an alternative theory.

Adding to the strange ephemerality of this case is how the bulk of the evidence seems to be electronic in nature: digital footprints, IP addresses, e-mail accounts, chat logs, Internet postings, messages, Bitcoin transactions. Much of this evidence comes from the laptop that Ulbricht had open at the time of his arrest, so it is not as though the government’s case is impossibly flimsy. But the nature of the evidence still undermines their efforts to make the allegations sound as serious as possible. The evidence they present inevitably makes it all sound like a video game, or a recap of an Internet forum dispute in which the community manager bickers with other moderators and ends up permabanning them from the site.