The Dread Pirate Roberts Sold on the Dark Web. I Sell on Jamaica Ave, With a License.

Every week somebody walks up to my counter, looks at the sign, looks at me, and asks the same thing.

"Yo. Silk Road. Like the website?"

Yeah. Like the website. And no. Not like the website at all.

I've never met another licensed dispensary owner who has to answer that question as often as I do, so let me give the long answer one time, on the record.

The original Dread Pirate Roberts

In 2011 a man named Ross Ulbricht launched a website called Silk Road. You couldn't find it on Google. It lived on Tor, a network built to hide who is using it, and it took payment in bitcoin, a currency most people had never heard of back then.

He ran it under a name borrowed from The Princess Bride: the Dread Pirate Roberts. In the story, the Dread Pirate Roberts isn't one man. It's a title, handed from pirate to pirate so the legend never dies.

The site sold drugs, mostly. Cannabis led the list. Federal investigators said it moved about $1.2 billion in sales between 2011 and 2013.

It ended on October 1, 2013, in a San Francisco public library. The FBI arrested Ulbricht there, and the government seized the site.

In February 2015 a Manhattan federal jury convicted him on all seven counts. On May 29, 2015, a federal judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

He served more than eleven years. Then, on January 21, 2025, President Trump announced a full and unconditional pardon.

That's the whole thing in five paragraphs. The longer version lives on our Silk Road website history page. I'm not retelling it here. I want to talk about what it meant, and what I did with the name.

What that name meant to a generation

If you came up in the early 2010s, Silk Road was the first time a lot of people heard the word bitcoin. It was also proof that the drug war hadn't ended anything.

Prohibition didn't stop demand. It pushed it underground, onto a screen, with no lab, no label, no ID check and nobody to call when something went wrong.

And things went wrong. Prosecutors linked at least six overdose deaths to drugs bought on that site. People went to prison. Families got wrecked. That is not a legend. That is the bill.

So when somebody asks me if I miss that era, the answer is no. I'm not selling the dark web. I'm selling the opposite of it.

But the name stuck in people's heads for a reason. It stood for a question nobody in power wanted to answer: if the demand never goes away, who gets to serve it, and under what rules?

New York answered that question in 2021. I'm part of the answer.

Then there's me

I'm a legacy guy from Queens. I came here at five and grew up off Hillside Ave. I'm justice-involved, with a cannabis conviction from before legalization. I don't hide it. I told that story in my owner letter. The short version: I paid for prohibition, and then I earned a license.

New York reserved its first retail licenses, called CAURD, for people like me. On February 23, 2024, Silk Road NYC opened at 166-30 Jamaica Ave under license OCM-CAURD-24-000062, held by NYSE3AU-RETAIL INC. DBA Silk Road NYC. QNS covered the opening as "from legacy to legal." Anybody can look us up on the state's dispensary location verification list.

So yeah. Same name as the most notorious marketplace in internet history. Opposite side of the law.

Call me the modern-day Dread Pirate Roberts if you want. People do. The difference is my ship has a license by the door, a regulator who knows exactly where to find me, and a tax bill every month.

Same name, opposite rules

The old Silk Road was a hidden market. Mine is a licensed online dispensary with a storefront behind it. Here's the contrast, line by line.

• Then: a hidden website you needed special software to reach. Now: a real menu on the open web and a storefront on Jamaica Ave with my name on the license.
• Then: anonymous sellers nobody could hold accountable. Now: products from New York licensed growers and processors, sold by a licensed store.
• Then: no lab, no label. Now: every product on my shelf is tested by a state-licensed lab and tracked from seed to sale in Metrc, the state's tracking system.
• Then: no ID, no age limit. Now: 21 and over only, with a government photo ID checked at the counter, at pickup and at the door on delivery.
• Then: no taxes, no receipts. Now: every sale taxed, every sale tracked, receipt in your hand.
• Then: bitcoin to stay hidden. Now: bitcoin accepted legally at the register, on the record.

You can order from our online dispensary at silkroadnyc.com for pickup at 166-30 Jamaica Ave or same-day delivery in Queens. Nothing gets mailed, nothing gets shipped, nothing leaves New York. Every order comes out of one licensed store, and every one of them gets an ID check before it changes hands.

Bitcoin, legally, at the counter

This is the part that makes people laugh. Yes, a dispensary named Silk Road takes bitcoin.

Back then, bitcoin was the currency people used to hide. Today you can pay with it at my register in Jamaica, Queens, in the open. You shop the menu in dollars, tell your budtender you want to pay in bitcoin, and pay from your own wallet. Same ID check, same tax, same receipt as cash. The details are on our bitcoin page.

Bitcoin is in-store only, at the counter. Online orders for pickup or delivery go through our regular checkout.

I call myself the bitcoin tech cannabis king of Queens. Half joke, half mission statement. I take bitcoin at the counter, I run an AI budtender on this website, and I built all of it on a state license.

Three Silk Roads

There have been three Silk Roads.

The first was the ancient trade route: caravans and camels moving silk, spices, paper and, yes, cannabis across Asia for about fifteen hundred years. That's the camel on our sign. The full story is on our Silk Road history page.

The second was the dark web, 2011 to 2013. Hidden, anonymous, unregulated, and finished in a federal courtroom.

The third is on Jamaica Ave. Licensed, tested, taxed, open to anyone 21 and over with an ID, with a camel on the sign and a door you can walk through.

Every era gets its Silk Road. Ours is legal. For the version with the camels, the family and the people behind the counter, read about us.

The name, on the federal record

I filed a federal trademark application for the SILK ROAD NYC design mark: the rider, the camel and the name. Serial number 98807315, filed October 17, 2024, in Class 35, which covers advertising, retail and information services. It's a pending application at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and you can check its status yourself.

Think about that. The name that once sat under an FBI seizure notice is the name I asked the federal government to look at for a licensed business, filed under my company's name and my store's address.

Why I keep the name

People tell me to change it. Too much baggage. Too easy to misunderstand.

I keep it because the baggage is the lesson. The market always existed. The only question was whether it would stay underground and dangerous, or come out licensed, tested and accountable.

A man got life in prison for the old Silk Road. I got a state license for the new one. Same plant at the center of both stories. Different decade, different law, different ending.

And the name has one more strange chapter. When I built our new website, I found out the domain I bought had its own dark-web-style past, from somebody else, years before me. I wrote that one up too: I bought a domain and found a dark-web drug shop's ghost.

Come see it

Silk Road NYC is at 166-30 Jamaica Ave, Jamaica, Queens, NY 11432. Browse the live menu, see how delivery works, check what's on at our events (all events are 21+, ID at the door), or read why people call us their cannabis dispensary in Jamaica, Queens.

Bring ID. Bring bitcoin if you want. Bring your questions about the name. I've heard them all, and I'll answer every one.

Sohan Bashar, owner, Silk Road NYC. License OCM-CAURD-24-000062.