The website is Silk Road, the most famous online black market in the world. And Ulbricht, the FBI claims, is its enigmatic founder, known until last week only as Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR. Alleged online drug kingpin Ross William Ulbricht was arrested in the sci-fi section of a San Francisco library. Ulbricht, who has an advanced degree in chemical engineering, had developed a cult-like following among the site's users as a peace-seeking libertarian who provided recreational drug users with access to affordable, high-quality drugs in a violence-free environment. But the FBI documents paint a picture of a profit-motivated opportunist who was happy to turn to torture and murder when his business was threatened. Ulbricht has denied all charges and those who have had interactions with DPR over the years find the allegations of violence incomprehensible. His is a story that will unfold in the weeks and months to come. Cyberspace is already awash with theories of how it will pan out, ranging from plausible to crackpot.

But what impact will the closure of Silk Road, where every drug imaginable was for sale, have on drug users and the illicit drug trade? In particular, how will it affect the thousands of Australians who were making regular purchases from the site? The villain with a thousand faces: alleged Silk Road kingpin Ross William Ulbricht. When Australian users tried to log in to the site on Thursday morning, they were greeted with a colourful notice bearing the badges of the FBI and four other American federal agencies advising ''This hidden site has been seized.'' Copies of the charges and indictments were soon available all over the internet. The FBI documents revealed that Australians were the third-most prolific users of Silk Road (and that is not a per capita number) behind USA and UK. This was obvious to anyone who visited the Silk Road forums, where Australian members and related topics were disproportionately represented. The reason is simple - recreational drugs in Australia are expensive. People were able to save 75 per cent or more by buying from overseas vendors and having the drugs delivered directly to their door, using Australia Post employees as unwitting mules.

While the shutdown has been welcomed by some, including Rod Bridge, whose son Preston died after taking 25i-NBOMe believed to have been purchased from Silk Road, others consider it futile and even dangerous. Right-to-die campaigner Philip Nitschke has been an outspoken supporter of the site as a dignified way for people to obtain euthanasia drugs. He appeared in the media last week lamenting its shutdown, saying it would have a devastating impact on those people. But most of Silk Road's customers were not there seeking to die, but rather to party. Several users of the site spoke to Fairfax Media about their future plans, which involve finding alternative online sources, shifting back to in-person sources or banding together with friends to bulk-buy. In not one case did anyone say they would stop using, sourcing or buying drugs as a result of the closure of Silk Road. ''Sam'', 38, has been buying personal amounts of drugs from Silk Road for 18 months, after seeing a piece on Channel 10's The Project (which ran on the back of The Age's story The Drug's in the Mail published on 27/4/12). He and his partner share drugs with friends who also made purchases from Silk Road. ''Sometimes it's every weekend, other times I go for a few months without,'' he says. He's not happy about the closure of Silk Road. ''It [buying drugs] used to be such a drama. Friends ringing around to see who could get what and if this week it was you, it meant you were effectively being a dealer, picking it up for everyone else, which I never liked. And then you'd feel bad if it was crap.''

With Silk Road, he claims, the quality was consistent and the price more than reasonable, something borne out by the FBI's analysis of more than 100 purchases made during the investigation. Sam would check the vendor feedback and peruse the forums for recent experiences before making a purchase. He never had to meet a dealer and took delivery in the comfort of his own home. Sam is keeping an eye on the other online black markets and will choose one when it's recommended by people he trusts. ''Luckily some of us have stocked up a bit,'' he says. At the other end of the drug-using scale is ''Paul'' who has been a heroin addict for five years. For him Silk Road was a godsend that enabled him to manage his habit by providing constant purity. The site's closure has hit him hard, he says.

His habit means he can't wait for a new online source. ''I and countless others like me got to go back to scoring from my real-life street sources and when you're talking about heroin it's not like going and scoring a 10-pack of [ecstasy tablets] for a festival on the weekend. I've got to go back to associating with criminals and the dregs of society.'' He is also concerned about the quality and purity of the product available to him on the street - but not concerned enough to contemplate giving up the drug. The closure of Silk Road is no more likely to prevent Australians from buying drugs online than the closure of Napster prevented them from illegally downloading music. And those who bought from Silk Road were ready - perhaps more so than Ulbricht was - for the sudden closure of the site. Back-ups of vendors' contact details had been collated and stored offsite. Sellers used chat board Reddit and the Silk Road forums - which remained active after the closure of the site - to announce where to find their stores on alternative markets Black Market Reloaded (BMR) and Sheep, both of which have been quietly playing second fiddle to Silk Road for the past two years. Several ''trusted and verified'' vendors have teamed up to launch Silk Road 2.0, which they claim is ''90 per cent finished''.

BMR has been so inundated with new members it has to close the site to new registrations every few hours. But some members have expressed reservations about transferring their business to BMR because the site does not subscribe to Silk Road's philosophy of not listing anything the intent or purpose of which is to harm or defraud others. Silk Road claimed the ''high moral ground'' of refusing to list weapons, stolen goods and credit cards, child porn and assassination services. Using technologies that offer anonymity - Tor for anonymous browsing, PGP for encrypted communications and untraceable currency Bitcoin - Silk Road has operated openly since January 2011. It would be easy to view the capture of Ulbricht and the closure of Silk Road as proof that anonymity on the internet is a fantasy. But although there is the unanswered question of how they got access to the Silk Road server, the 34-page FBI complaint details good old-fashioned sleuthing, not hacking or exploiting the technology. Human error - Ulbricht's own carelessness - was his downfall. The technologies that underpin the online black markets remain effective if used together and properly. The value of traditional techniques to track down cybercriminals concurs with a report put together for the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission in May 2012. Hidden in Plain Sight was swiftly disseminated among Silk Road's vendors, and seen by Fairfax Media.

The report described anonymity and encryption, darknets, PGP, Tor and peer-to-peer technologies, concluding that the technology when used properly was effective against infiltration efforts. ''The main vulnerability of Tor and the hidden services is not the technology, rather it is the user,'' the paper said. ''Human error, resulting from a lack of understanding of the technology, or even carelessness or impulsivity, may result in Tor's sophisticated anonymity and encryption being bypassed.'' It was in this potential for human error that law enforcement agencies saw their best chance for detecting crime, as the authors outlined in the ''ways forward'' section of the report. Silk Road's users could be comfortable that the technology, used correctly, would keep them safe. Indeed, the Silk Road-related arrests in Australia have been a result of human error. A pair of teenagers in Western Australia were turned in by their own parents who intercepted their mail. A Melbourne man bought large quantities of a variety of party drug from Silk Road and then on-sold them to local customers, but failed to notice 12 packages of drugs addressed to his home went missing and he continued to make orders.

He received a 3½ year jail sentence. Other Silk Road vendors have been more successful. One of the top Australian vendors sold cocaine, MDMA and psychedelics for a year on the site. He claimed to spend $360,000 this year importing in bulk from trusted overseas vendors, on-selling to Australians who were willing to pay a premium for locally posted drugs rather than risk receiving parcels that might have been intercepted by customs. Although he declined to reveal his income for the year, party drugs are generally sold at a 300-400 per cent mark-up domestically. Representatives from Australian Customs and the Australian Federal Police both claimed to be unable to comment on an ongoing investigation and gave Fairfax warnings about regularly exchanging information and intelligence with their overseas counterparts, and continuing to target those who would flout the law. But all indications so far are that Australians continue to want and procure illicit drugs. And for many, the risk of being detected by law enforcement for drugs in the mail is preferable to the risk of dealing with real-life drug dealers.

Loading Like the Greek myth of Hydra, cut off one head and five more will spring up in its place. Silk Road may be dead, but online drug dealing is not. Eileen Ormsby is a Melbourne journalist.