Payments for goods on Silk Road were made with the virtual currency Bitcoin, which can be hard to monitor. "The complainant further alleges, in part, that the Silk Road Hidden Website is designed to facilitate the illicit commerce hosted on the site by providing anonymity to its users, by operating on what is known as The Onion Router or Tor network... and by requiring all transactions to be paid in bitcoins, an electronic currency designed to be as anonymous as cash." To receive a Bitcoin, a user must also have a Bitcoin address - a randomly generated string of 27 to 34 letters and numbers - which acts as a kind of virtual postbox to and from which the Bitcoins are sent. In one such message, a user believed to be Mr Ulbricht allegedly said: "Has anyone seen Silk Road yet? It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24373759%23sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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