The man accused of running the Silk Road, the Internet's biggest drug market, is about to get his day in court. Prosecutors and defense lawyers are already poring over juror questionnaires, and a panel of New York citizens will be selected on Tuesday.

There still isn't much that's been made public about how the trial will proceed. Whatever happens, the trial, expected to last at least four weeks, is sure to reveal more about the dark corners of the so-called "Darknet" and the authorities' efforts to master it.

Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan who prosecutors say was the mastermind of the drug trafficking website, has remained steadfast in his innocence since his arrest more than a year ago. Barring a last-minute deal, his fate will soon be in the hands of a jury. If convicted, he faces decades in prison.

Silk Road wasn't the first place on the Internet that sold drugs, but it quickly became the biggest, and boldest. The site was founded in early 2011, and burst into the public consciousness in June of that year, when Gawker published an article showcasing "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable." Everything on Silk Road was bought and sold using bitcoin, a peer-to-peer digital currency.

"Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins," explained reporter Adrian Chen, who noted that a single Bitcoin was worth $8.67 when his article was published. "That's probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience."

The openness of the market—screenshots of product, quality reviews akin to legitimate sites like eBay—outraged some politicians, who called on police agencies to shutter the site. "It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen," fumed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in a press conference arranged days after the Gawker scoop.

Silk Road wasn't just bold, it was effective. An earlier marketplace, the Farmer's Market, saw about $1 million in drug sales between 2007 and 2009, according to the indictment against that site. A 2012 study on Silk Road found it was selling more than about twice that amount every month. The site's administrator, who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts, didn't ship product himself. Instead, he took a cut of each sale, between 8 and 15 percent depending on size, prosecutors say.

During the site's lifespan, authorities said it had facilitated well over one million transactions, with a total value of about $1.2 billion. DPR got $80 million in commissions.

For the most part, the site's sellers kept their customers satisfied. On a five-star rating scale, 96.5 percent of buyers gave five-star ratings, and 1.3 percent gave four-star ratings, while just 1.1 percent gave the lowest rating of one star.

The Silk Road was finally shuttered in October 2013. Federal agents burst into a public library in San Francisco, where they arrested Ulbricht, who was sitting in the science fiction section working on his laptop. This, they said, was the Dread Pirate Roberts, the admin who held the site together. Not only was he the center of an online drug empire, he stood accused of using violence to defend it: Ulbricht had ordered the murder of no less than six people, according to the indictment.

The site's phenomenal success bred imitators. Within a month of the site's collapse, the Darknet featured "Silk Road 2.0," which used almost everything from the model of the original site, down to the green camel logo. The site was infiltrated by law enforcement, almost from the inception; in November, Blake Benthall was arrested and fingered as "Defcon," the new site's admin. Like Ulbricht, he is a young, tech-savvy man, living a modest life in a shared San Francisco apartment.

Identity

The biggest question of the trial is clear: is Ross Ulbricht Dread Pirate Roberts? In order to convince a jury that he isn't, there's a lot of evidence Ulbricht's attorney, Joshua Dratel, will have to explain.

The evidence pointing to Ulbricht dates from the earliest days of the site. The jury will see the posts on forums like shroomery.org and Bitcoin Talk, that sought out engineering talent and advertised an "anonymous amazon.com." The early posts pointed to silkroad420.wordpress.com, a site with instructions about how to get to the Tor-only, anonymous site. One of those posts directed interested respondents to email "rossulbricht at gmail dot com."

That same Gmail address was attached to an account on Stack Overflow, where Ulbricht asked programming questions like: "How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?"

The toughest evidence to explain will be what authorities pulled from Ulbricht's laptop, the computer he was using when he was arrested in the public library. Prosecutors say he kept a log on his computer, which seems to correspond to DPR's attempts to take out his enemies. According to the government, in April 2013 Ulbricht was making notes on his computer that said "sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his 3 associates," among other incriminating statements. The dates correspond with DPR's messages captured through the Silk Road system.

Even though the government didn't feel like it had enough evidence to actually charge Ulbricht with attempted murder, the judge is allowing all of that evidence into the trial. She accepted the government's argument, that the evidence is part of a story that points to Ulbricht as the real boss of Silk Road.

The first of the six "hits," against a former Silk Road employee who DPR thought had stolen money, was set up by a government agent. DPR was sent a fake photo "confirming" the murder, before he sent over the rest of the $80,000 fee, prosecutors say. As for the next five murders, offered up to DPR by a user named "redandwhite," the government admits it has no evidence any violence took place. Roberts paid $650,000 for what may have been an elaborate scam.

Getting the murder-for-hire evidence in the case puts the authorities in an excellent tactical position: they can talk about the accusations of violence, without needing to prove them. That's helped them at every stage of the case, especially in making sure Ulbricht didn't get bail. Last week, Ulbricht's lawyer lost his attempt to keep the murder-for-hire evidence out of the case; the jury will hear all the gory details, even though they won't render a decision on it.

Technology

As the government lays out its case, it will have to reveal more detail about how the Silk Road was taken down. The most valuable evidence from the government will likely be what they found on Ulbricht's seized computer, which prosecutors say includes logs describing the attempted murders, as well as spreadsheets detailing Silk Road's finances. At the time of his arrest, he had opened a page called "mastermind" which showed the site's recent transactions.

Despite the lack of attempted murder charges, those accusations are critical to shaping the perception of Ulbricht that prosecutors want to take hold in the minds of jurors—and the public. The trial won't be all digital forensics; both sides will have to make a case about what Ulbricht's intent was, to explain whatever involvement he had in the site.

Comparing that data to the data they copied from the Silk Road servers will be a critical part of the case. But it still isn't completely clear how the government found the Silk Road servers at all. Early on, Ulbricht's lawyer suggested that the NSA might have helped out.

To counter that allegation, the FBI had to show more of its cards. "Ulbricht conjures up a bogeyman – the National Security Agency," wrote prosecutors in September. They said the FBI was able to find the server through an error in the Silk Road login page that leaked an Icelandic IP address. Reykjavik police went to the data center that held Silk Road's server and secretly made a copy of the data.

Silk Road used a CAPTCHA service that pulled data from the open Internet, which "leaked" the true IP address. Some security researchers saw problems with that story, though; Nicholas Weaver, a computer researcher at UC Berkeley, looked at the Silk Road traffic logs made public by the FBI, and said "the leaky CAPTCHA story is full of holes.” Other observers said the FBI's tactics looked more like hacking than a lucky break caused by security error.

In any case, law enforcement arrested a variety of Silk Road vendors, apparently without the help of any special technology—they simply bought drugs, then apparently found the shippers didn't cover their tracks well enough. One such arrest was Cornelis Jan Slomp, a 22-year-old Dutch seller named "SuperTrip," arrested in the summer of 2013, when Silk Road was still doing a brisk business.

Politics

The government tried to get an order banning any mention of Ulbricht's libertarian politics; the judge denied that request as moot, saying she was satisfied with the defense's assurances that they are “well aware of the limits on appropriate argument."

DPR talked a big game when it came to how idealistic the site was. In his single extensive interview, conducted with Forbes just two months before the bust, DPR emphasized that the site refused to sell anything that could "harm innocent people." Stolen goods, counterfeit money, hitmen, child pornography—none of that had a place in his market.

When it came to selling drugs, though, DPR had no remorse. He said:

I am proud of what I do. I can’t think of one drug that doesn’t have at least some harmful effects. That’s really not the point though. People own themselves, they own their bodies, and it is their right to put into their bodies whatever they choose. It’s not my place, or the government’s, or anyone else’s to say what a person does with their own body. Giving people that freedom of choice and the dignity of self-ownership is a good thing.

His view of peer-to-peer technology was utopian. "This is just the beginning," DPR explained:

It’s really part of a larger transformation, driven by peer-to-peer technology and the internet as a whole. The people now can control the flow and distribution on information, and the flow of money. Sector by sector the state is being cut out of the equation and power is being returned to the individual. I don’t think anyone can comprehend the magnitude of the revolution we are in. I think it will be looked back on as an epoch in the evolution of mankind.

The tone is reminiscent of things Ulbricht said in a public LinkedIn post. "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind," he wrote. "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

But while Ulbricht's politics won't necessarily play a big role at trial, they matter to his supporters. Ulbricht's arrest has motivated his friends and family, as well as supporters of legalizing drug laws, who have shown up since his first court appearances. His supporters have posited the case as being about Internet freedom itself. On Tuesday, some of them have made clear their intention to show up to the federal courthouse in Manhattan where Ulbricht will be tried.

Ars will also be there, describing the scene in court.