The post Skull, $5 Million; Banana, $6 Million; Freedom, Priceless appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

“It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”  This message was posted by Satoshi Nakamoto to BitcoinTalk on December 11, 2010. A couple of months later, in February 2011, the Silk Road marketplace was launched, and only a couple months after — on April 23, 2011 — Satoshi posted his last message. In October 2013, Ross Ulbricht was captured by the FBI and the Silk Road fell — only to be replaced by a thousand more copycat marketplace sites. The rest is Bitcoin history. Ross Ulbricht chose to center his Bitcoin 2025 keynote speech around an experience he had clearing wasp nests in a cabin in the woods. Wearing a suit and tie, recalling growing “magic mushrooms” to kickstart activity on Silk Road, Ross held the attention of the main stage audience of over 8,000 at Bitcoin 2025 Las Vegas in the Venetian Expo. I was sitting in one of the best seats in the house: side stage with his mother Lyn and three other supporters of Ross.  Freedom. Decentralization. Unity. After over 4,100 days in federal custody and many months in special housing units (solitary confinement), Ross boiled it down to these three words to summarize his first message to the community. Freedom. Decentralization. Unity. Following a “21 ways to hack the fiat system” keynote from Michael Saylor, Ross’ three ways to move forward were refreshingly simple.  You would have thought Ross had been speaking in front of thousands of people for years, seeing how calm and commanding he was on the Nakamoto stage. Lyn Ulbricht called me a few days after the speech, as I was driving a U-Haul truck full of the art gallery contents across the country, including…

---

Filed under: News - @ June 11, 2025 7:23 pm