Pink Pill Sparked Investigation

Nick Bilton shares a story about how the Silk Road investigation began with a single pill.

"What I find so fascinating about technology is all these websites and products and companies start with this little one thing and they grow into these things that take over the world. For me, the pink pill, the single solitary pill of ecstasy, was the beginning of the story which was just going to become a tidal wave that took over everything.

I started the book with Jared, who wanted to be an FBI agent but ended up being a homeland security agent. He would sit there and watch packages come in and would notice things like an envelope looking weird because it's handwritten in a certain way. It's crazy that one of the few different ways that Ross Ulbricht was caught was just traditional police work as opposed to something more complex. It was shocking that it was just eyeballing things.

That's why I started with the pink pill, the single solitary pink pill. There's a paragraph in the book about how the website started with a single line of code and all of a sudden he creates this world. I wanted to show how these things start with one small element - a single diode, a single line of code, a single pill - and then grow to take over the world."