Ross Ulbricht is forced to spend the rest of his life in prison, and October 1 marked the beginning of his seventh year behind bars. Ulbricht has recently authored a letter explaining that he’s “forgotten what freedom actually feels like” and he’s also realized that he lost some of the “best years of his life.” Meanwhile, Ulbricht’s clemency petition has been gaining significant traction and has gathered more than 212,000 signatures to date.
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Ross Ulbricht’s Seventh Year Behind Bars Begins
It’s been six years since Ross Ulbricht was arrested and put behind bars for his involvement with the Silk Road marketplace. The 35-year old is serving a double life sentence, plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. He was arrested in October 2013 by the FBI in the San Francisco Public Library and this month marks the start of his seventh revolution around the sun locked in prison. A week before his seventh year anniversary, Ulbricht wrote a meaningful letter about how Bitcoin equals freedom. Ulbricht recalled the early days when two pizzas were sold for 10,000 BTC and he said at the time no one knew how the experiment would turn out. However, Ulbricht insists the power behind the Bitcoin phenomenon came from the dream, a conviction and “enough infectious enthusiasm to bootstrap a digital contrivance into a multi-billion dollar phenomenon we are only beginning to see the effects of.” He says it was like “magic” that bitcoins became valuable without authoritative decree because of the community’s passionate vision. Ulbricht adds:
Bitcoin did not appear in a vacuum. It was a solution to a problem cryptographers had been struggling with for many years: How to create digital
