Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, takes the stage at Bitcoin 2025 for his first public address since being pardoned. He reflects on his imprisonment and the struggle for individual freedom.

ROSS ULBRICHT: Hey, gang. I’m not in the prison cell anymore. Standing on the stage right here in front. On this exact day, May 29th, exactly one decade ago, I was standing in a courtroom in front of a judge. On that day, that judge gave me two life sentences, plus 40 years without parole. I was just 31 years old. If she and all the others behind my prosecution had their way, I would have grown old and eventually died still in prison. Instead, I’m here. Just a few months ago, I was trapped behind those prison walls and didn’t know if I would ever get out. Now I’m free. I’m free. That’s because of you. You made this moment possible. Can you feel it? Let that sink in. You. You. You. You. You. You did this. Thank you. And you’re not alone. You are a part of something much bigger. This is bigger than Bitcoin. This is bigger than crypto. Many people just like you saying we care about freedom, and keeping somebody like Ross in a cage until he dies is a threat to freedom itself. It took President Trump recognizing that an injustice had been done, and that so many of you demanded that I be free. I am so, so thankful that we elected him and that he is who he is. He is a man who does what he says he’ll do. He said he’d free me and he did. Period. So a few years ago, when I was still in prison, trapped and desperate, I spoke to you at this conference through the prison phone. By show of hands, how many of you have heard the speech I gave at Bitcoin 2021? Okay, about 20% of you. In that speech, I wanted you to understand what it means to lose your freedom. I wish I had known before I created Silk Road. Before I risked my freedom. So those lessons that I had to learn the hard way, I wanted to get to you. I lost even more of my freedom because of that speech. The prison threw me in the hole over it for a while, and when they let me out, they put me under heavy surveillance for years, all the way up to the point that President Trump pardoned me. You know what? I’m glad I did it. Connecting with you that day felt so, so good because it was like a small part of me had broken beyond the prison walls, even if only for a little while. So today is the mirror image of that day. The day I want you to understand what it means to win your freedom. Winning your freedom feels as amazing as losing it feels awful. I want you to understand that. Because when it comes to freedom, we’re not there yet. There’s still more freedom to be won. There’s still more work to be done. I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone, anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for. I wish you could know what it felt like to take those first steps out of that prison into freedom. I truly wish you could be overwhelmed by such a huge wave of freedom all at once. In that moment, feeling that, I knew all the years of effort, all the pain, all the struggle was worth it. Here’s what it’s like: Freedom is worth the struggle. I have to believe it. I actually got used to being in prison. For so many years, it just became normal. In order to keep my head and stay strong, I had to accept what had happened to me, where I was. I couldn’t fight it every moment of every day. But there’s a danger in that place. I found that we can lose the desire for freedom. We can get used to our chains. We can forget that they’re even there. David Bailey put it in perspective for me when we were talking about me coming to speak at this conference. He said, “Ross, you took Bitcoin from 0 to 1, and while you were in prison, we-the community-took it from 1 to 10. But we still need to go from 10 to 100.” He’s right. I mean, look at the last 14 years and what a wild ride it’s been. When I lost Silk Road, a whole Bitcoin set you back less than a dollar. Pocket change. Can you imagine that? Now they’re worth over $ 100,000 each. Back then, there was just one exchange you could buy them on, unless you wanted to scour message boards or go to local meetups. Now it seems like every app I download has a built-in wallet with one-click buying options. There are dozens of new cryptocurrencies and blockchains, each one fascinating in its own right. Thousands more I’ll never have time to learn about. There’s DeFi, Web3, and now there’s AI to help me navigate it all. It’s not just I… I effectively went into a time capsule in 2013, and now I’m coming out like Rip Van Winkle. I mean, just a few months ago when I walked out of prison, I’d never seen a drone. I had never experienced VR-I still haven’t. I never chatted with AI-it’s all hitting me at once. Free. New technology. The fact that I have a future-it’s alive. I was imprisoned, and now I get to live through this incredible time with all of you. What a blessing. What a miracle. What a gift. So I got to do tech. I feel like I’m way behind the curve, but I’m starting to suspect that maybe we’re all feeling that way at least a little. I mean, everything is moving so fast right now, and it’s kind of thrilling to imagine where it’s all going. But that question remains: how do we take the next leap? How do we go from 10 to 100? Because of the speed. Because of the chaos. It’s more important than ever to stay true to our principles. It’s easy to lose sight of principle when everything’s happening all at once. There’s a thousand things pulling your attention in every direction. Principles should be simple and few. Today I’d like to mention three. Freedom. Decentralization. Unity. So remember those three: freedom, decentralization, unity. Let me take you back to before I… chrysochroa? Back in 2010, I wanted to have some magic mushrooms on hand to sell on the site, so it wouldn’t be totally empty when I launched it. But I didn’t want to get them from a friend of a friend or whatever, because I didn’t want to get caught. Well, that turned out… So instead, I rented a cabin outside of town where I could grow my own. But when I showed up at the cabin, I found that there were seven wasp nests tucked in all the corners of the front porch, with one big one hanging right over the front door. There were wasps everywhere, swarming in the air and crawling all over the nests. The cabin was totally uninhabitable. The wasp infestation needed to be taken care of. But I didn’t want to call an exterminator or call my landlord. For obvious reasons. I was on my own. But I remembered a trick that my father had shown me when I was a kid for removing wasps. What he did was he got a towel, squirted it out of his hands… He got as close as he could to the wasp nest, and then at the last moment he darted out, wrapped it up, and cinched the towel closed. The wasps couldn’t sting through the towel, and they couldn’t get out. So incredibly, it worked. There I was, on the wasp-infested porch. Heart was pounding as I prepared to do what I’d seen my dad do. Many things I’ve done in my life-I wouldn’t try this one at home. So I selected the nest that was furthest from the others, because I didn’t know if the other nests would come to their aid. I positioned myself, threw the towel around as close as I could, ready to flee if I had to. But when I wrapped up the nest… It was as if the other wasps didn’t even notice. So I moved around the porch and carefully removed each wasp nest one by one, until there were no more wasps-not even the big nest over the front door. So why did I tell you this story? Let’s look at what made the wasps strong-and what made them weak. Remember: freedom, decentralization, unity. The wasps were strong because they were free. Each wasp could act independently, and it was impossible to keep track of so many individual wasps. A sting could come from any direction. Freedom was our strength as well. In prison, every move was monitored and controlled, constantly dominated by the system. A mousetrap. No freedom. That big-weak. With freedom, we have choices. With choices, we become unpredictable. Just like the wasps. Choice is the essence of freedom. Any one of us could create the next piece of liberating technology that empowers the people of the world. And compared to the constraints I lived under in prison, there’s very little standing in our way. Bitcoin doesn’t work without freedom. Bitcoin’s power comes from the fact that any one of us can mine. Any one of us can generate addresses. We choose. Any one of us can send bitcoins to anyone else. We’re all on equal footing with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, we’re all free. Losing so much of my freedom really helped me understand what it is and why it’s so important. There were times when I had lost so much freedom that I couldn’t even choose what position to hold my body in because I was cuffed and shackled so tight. In those moments, I understood that freedom is not a binary switch that is either off or on. Being outside of prison walls does not automatically mean you are free. And being within them does not mean you are not. Because even in those moments, I had choices. I could choose to resist or I could choose to accept. I could have a peaceful attitude or a belligerent attitude. I could let the people taking my freedom win. Or I could find joy deep down inside. Where they couldn’t touch it. In those moments… I made joy just being alive. That was my victory. That was how I kept the torch of freedom burning. Next, the wasps were strong because they are decentralized. Seven nests were harder to handle than just one. If they had all been in one big nest, I would have simply removed that nest without worrying about the others. Decentralization is our strength as well. We can argue all day about how things can be more decentralized. Those are good arguments to have. But as a principle, decentralization is the goal that we strive for. Bitcoin’s strength is decentralization. Bitcoin lives on the internet-it is decentralized. Anyone can run the Bitcoin protocol and connect online. There are people from every corner of the globe-people we’ll never meet-validating and mining the blocks that make up the blockchain. There are scores of wallets and exchanges spread out all over the world. And because Bitcoin is decentralized this way-this way-nothing can stop it. Nothing. If that wasn’t enough, there are countless forks and blockchains all riffing off of Satoshi’s original design. This too is a form of decentralization. So long as we are free to choose, we want as many of these experiments going on as possible. The strong will survive. The system as a whole becomes more robust and able to adapt. With decentralization, there is no single point of failure. And that’s a lesson I learned the hard way with Silk Road. But… Despite their strengths… Despite being free and decentralized… The wasps were weak because they lacked unity. Any one of those wasps was free to come sting me. But none did. They were decentralized, so they had the opportunity. I took it.If they had a single force there-if they had unified-when I reached for that first nest, I would have been flipped. Those things really hurt. Thank God you are not wasps. I was put in prison for life. I was isolated, weak. I was stripped of everything, with nothing to give anyone. But you didn’t abandon me. You didn’t forget me. You wrote me letters. You raised money for my defense. When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slander and the smears. And in the end… When I didn’t know if I would ever get out… And I was behind those thick iron bars… You even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future. You got him to see… That decentralization and freedom are our future. You said Ross is one of us. We stay united. You said we want Ross out here with us. You said, Free Ross. You did this. There were days when I thought I would die in that awful cage. Somehow that spark-an idea-that was Bitcoin… Back in the early days… That idea I risked-and lost-my freedom for… It grew into a movement. A movement so powerful that more than a decade later, it came back around and freed me. Now, prison… Sadly, prisoners tend to divide themselves into factions. Resources are scarce and isolated individuals are preyed upon. So groups tend to dominate. And there are conflicts between the groups. Unity among the prisoners is lost. It’s a very difficult environment to navigate, and I didn’t understand it at first. But the guards, the wardens, the prison administration-they actually like it that way. They like and encourage the division. You’ve heard the saying: Divide and conquer, right? Well, there’s a corollary to it, which says: Divide and rule. Prisoners have already been conquered. So it’s the job of a prison to rule them. It’s easier to rule when your subjects are fighting each other than when they’re fighting you. The only times I saw the wardens show respect to the prisoners was when we were united. When we all wrote letters with a unified message-they showed up to listen. When we all went on hunger strike together-they showed up to listen. Unified, we stopped being treated like objects. We started being treated like men. Like equals. Unified, we were able to stand together and demand the respect that we deserve. So. How does this apply to us? We can argue all day-but please never see each other as enemies. Those that oppose decentralization and freedom love it when we’re divided. I promise you. So stay united. So long as we can agree that we deserve freedom and that decentralization is how we secure it… We can be united. We can have each other’s backs. Just like you had mine. Freedom. Decentralization. Unity. Stay true to these principles. And the future is ours.

He spoke to the conference four years ago from prison:
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