Silk Road, for its more than two and a half years online, was an unprecedented online narcotics emporium. But according to a journal found on the laptop of its alleged creator Ross Ulbricht, Ulbricht wanted it to be even more: a "brand" that extended from communications tools to banking.

In Ulbricht's trial Wednesday, prosecutor Timothy Howard read aloud from a journal that was found on the defendant's Samsung 700z laptop, which was seized at the time of his arrest in a San Francisco library in October, 2013. The journal, which goes back at least as far as 2010, seems to provide the most detailed look yet at Ulbricht's plans for his libertarian contraband market. And the journal reveals that before his arrest, Ulbricht had allegedly planned to create chat software, a currency exchange, and more, all under the "Silk Road brand."

The young Texan had allegedly planned to expand the Silk Road into a "brand people can come to trust and rely on," according to a 2011 passage from the journal. "Silk Road chat, Silk Road exchange, Silk Road credit union, Silk Road market, Silk Road everything!"

Ulbricht's journal credits that ambition in part to a "mentor" who he calls Variety Jones. "He has helped me to see a larger vision," Ulbricht writes.

That roadmap for Silk Road was never detailed in public by the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous figure who ran the Silk Road and often authored posts on its user forums describing the Silk Road market in revolutionary, libertarian terms. But when I interviewed Roberts in 2013, he did allude to plans for a "next phase" of the site, including the sale of consumer electronics, possibly re-introducing the sale of firearms (which had been earlier banned from the site), and as Ulbricht seems to write in his journal, secure communication tools. At the time of our interview that last topic had become particularly relevant thanks to the first published leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "One other big [development] I’d like to mention that is coming whether we do it or not is communication privacy," Roberts told me.

If it wasn’t clear before that the state is your enemy, it should be now that the biggest covert intelligence agency in the biggest government on the planet has been stealing nearly everyone’s private communications. We have the technology right now to make this impossible for them. End to end encryption and Tor need to become the standard for communications globally, just as SSL has. You must demand it from your communications providers. Again, if Silk Road can play a role in this transition, I’m more than happy to provide.

Ulbricht's journal, which the prosecution began to dig into for the first time today in Ulbricht's trial, appears to provide a goldmine of evidence for his guilt. Prosecutor Howard read aloud a passage from 2010 that details growing the first 10 pounds of psychedelic mushrooms in a cabin in Bastrop, Texas to serve as the Silk Road's first products, launching the site on the anything-goes web host Freedom Hosting, and watching the site's first transactions. "I was so excited I didn't know what to do with myself," Ulbricht writes of the Silk Road's early days.2

The journal goes on to describe recruiting the site's first staffers, described by the names SYG, Digitalalchemy and Utah, as well as meeting his soon-to-be adviser Variety Jones. Later, Ulbricht even describes partly confessing his Silk Road secret to someone named Jessica. "I felt compelled to reveal myself to her. It was terrible," he writes. "I told her I have secrets...I'm so stupid."

"Everyone knows I work on a bitcoin exchange," Ulbricht adds. "Everyone knows too much. Dammit."

Ulbricht's journal will likely serve as the centerpiece for the evidence the prosecution has assembled to prove the narcotics conspiracy, money laundering, counterfeiting and other charges he faces. Aside from the journal, FBI computer scientist Thomas Kiernan on Wednesday showed pictures he took of Ulbricht's seized computer showing that he was logged into a Silk Road administrator panel called "mastermind" at the time of his arrest. Prosecutor Howard went on to lay out a maelstrom of evidence pulled from Ulbricht's laptop, including a PGP private key that had been used for "signing" messages as the Dread Pirate Roberts, html code that matched the code on the Silk Road website, and an application for "economic citizenship" in the Caribbean island of Dominica that had been filled out with Ulbricht's full details.1

Ulbricht's defense attorneys have suggested that they'll show that while Ulbricht did in fact create the Silk Road, he gave it up to the administrator who would become the Dread Pirate Roberts. Roberts, they argued to the jury in their opening statement, eventually "lured" Ulbricht back to the site to serve as the "perfect fall guy." The defense has yet to explain how a detailed journal of planning and managing the Silk Road ended up on Ulbricht's computer.

In the meantime, however, much of that journal evidence reads like evidence of a massive operational security misjudgement on the part of an overconfident online drug lord. "I imagine someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it," the journal reads in one entry.

The prosecution also cited chat logs found on Ulbricht's computer that seemed to show him communicating with Silk Road staffers, some of which were almost absurdly irony. "Put yourself in the shoes of a prosecutor trying to build a case against you," prosecutor Howard read aloud at one point, allegedly quoting Ulbricht. "When you look at the chance of us getting caught, it's incredibly small."

1Updated 1/21/2015 5:40pm with more evidence presented by the prosecution.

2Correction 1/21/2015 10:55: An earlier version of this story mistated the context of a quote from the journal found on Ross Ulbricht's computer, and quoted the journal as stating he had grown 10 kilos of psychedelic mushrooms when he had in fact grown 10 pounds.**