ATM hacking manuals, cocaine energy drinks, and crystal clear meth - all this and much more was included in the wide range of services on the Silk Road website. In the vastness of the portal, you could even hire a hitman if you had enough money.

Ross Ulbricht is the creator of the project, which helped drug dealers to hide from the eyes of "Big Brother" and played a big role in the life cycle of bitcoin.

Ulbricht launched Silk Road in January 2011 and became the first user of the system. Owning quite simple technologies for growing psilocybin mushrooms, he began to sell the Banned Substances for bitcoins. When the mushrooms that Ross had grown was over, other drug dealers turned Silk Road into a real "online store".

A year later, Silk Road looked like Amazon and eBay with user profiles, product lists, and deal reviews.

All this has led to a huge increase in the popularity of the Silk Road. Over the two and a half years of its existence, about a million customers have used the platform. By June 2013, almost a million people had registered on the site. The total turnover exceeded one billion dollars.

The total volume of transactions on the site for 2.5 years brought more than 9.5 million bitcoins of revenue from 1,229,465 transactions, collecting 614,305 bitcoins fees.

What started out as a libertarian dream ended in prison, but that doesn't mean that Silk Road left only a negative trace. Putting aside ethical issues, Silk Road has become a key element to the eventual adoption of cryptocurrencies, in particular BTC.

It's no exaggeration to say that the platform has helped pave the way for the entire industry.