First there was an absolutely, utterly, nauseatingly terrifying incident that had occurred just before the site was set to open, when Ross, by sheer fate, had almost ended up jail. Austin had been in the middle of a heat wave a few weeks earlier, and somehow there had been a water leak in the apartment housing his secret magic mushroom farm. The landlord had gone into the space to inspect the flood and instead had found Ross’s drug laboratory. Irate, the landlord called Ross to tell him the next phone call was to the local police. Ross tore through the space, trying to get everything out before the cops arrived, and thankfully screeched away just in time. When he returned home that evening, smelling rank from the mushroom residue, he was so shaken up it took Julia hours to calm him. The thought of what would have happened had he been caught was enough to put Ross on the edge of a panic attack.

The day after the Gawker article, Ross got up, groggy and on edge, and was greeted by a total catastrophe. No, the site hadn’t been shut down by law enforcement. Or knocked off-line by hackers. Nothing like that. It was much worse.
While some people had simply come to the Silk Road to window-shop, others were actually buying and selling drugs. And every time someone purchased something, some of Ross’s Bitcoins vanished in the transaction. What the hell is going on? There must be a bug in the code. His personal profits, which were now in the double-digit thousands of dollars, were literally dwindling by hundreds of dollars every few hours. Ross had to figure out how to fix a problem he hadn’t even known existed.
It was sickening.
After digging through his code for hours trying to find the error, Ross realized he had originally built the Silk Road using a standard piece of code called “bitcoind,” which connected his payment system. Now he was discovering that he had created that interface improperly. He just had no idea where the mistake was in his code. All he knew was that he had essentially built a cash register where money fell out of the bottom into the ether whenever he opened it. And right now, as slews of new customers came to the site, that register was opening and closing at a staggering rate.
When he did the math, at the speed with which people were buying drugs on the site, the Silk Road was fast approaching insolvency. He would soon be the first person in history to start an underground drug Web site on the Internet and the first person in history to see it go bankrupt because he had written so much shitty code.