MANHATTAN (CN) - Both prosecutors and defense attorneys depicted the world of Silk Road as a sordid and untrustworthy place on Tuesday.
For prosecutors, it was a place where a former Eagle Scout from Texas named Ross Ulbricht lusted for money and power as the "digital kingpin" of an underground drug site that traded over $182.9 million in narcotics around the world.
But Ulbricht's attorneys portrayed Silk Road as another dark corner of an already murky Internet, a land where "deception and misdirection" helped frame their client.
Neither side disputes that more than $18 million in digital currency was found on Ulbricht's computer, and the "mastermind" page in Silk Road listed that amount under "cold bitcoins."
Nor do the parties contest that journal entries found on Ulbricht's computer show that his first sales on the website were "several kilos of high shrooms" that he grew near his home in Austin, Texas.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Serrin Turner said that Silk Road was Ulbricht's "baby," one that he nursed from its founding to his Oct. 1, 2013, arrest.
He scoffed at the defense's attempt to paint the Silk Road as an "economic experiment" their client started and then passed on to one or more administrators.
"He wasn't forming a content-neutral economic experiment," Turner said. "He was setting up a drug website."
Silk Road's leader Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR, takes his name from a character in a William Golding novel turned 1980s film "The Princess Bride."
Just as the fictional Dread Pirate assumes many identities, Ulbricht's attorney Joshua Dratel contended that his client passed on Silk Road to one or more unknown operators, who set him up to protect their multimillion-dollar enterprise.
"One of the fundamentals in this case is that DPR and Mr. Ulbricht cannot be the same person," Dratel said.
As expected, Dratel doubled down on an accusation he made earlier at trial that digital currency entrepreneur Mark Karpeles, who ran the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, had the "motivation" to frame his client.
Karpeles made headlines earlier this year by reportedly losing $400 million of his clients' funds before surfacing in Japan.
He was a "major player" in the bitcoin market, Dratel noted.
Evidence showed that the digital currency's value skyrocketed - from more than $100 per coin to $1,200 - on the day of Ulbricht's arrest.
Calling this defense "absurd," prosecutor Turner noted chats logs found in Ulbricht's laptop exposed the multiple DPR theory as "a bogus cover story."
"It's a con," Turner said. "It's a bogus cover story to fool people into believing there's a rotating command of the site."
In one of those chat logs, a Silk Road administrator named "Variety Jones" suggested using Dread Pirate Roberts name as a cover because the movie character is associated with a rotating command, Turner noted.
Turner said that DPR had referred to this when speaking to another referentially named site administrator, Inigo, about "my little alibi."
"I'm clever, so I can bs when I need to," DPR told Inigo.
Turner hoped this remark would embolden the jurors. "[Ulbricht] still thinks he's clever," the prosecutor said. "He thinks he can pull one over on you."
Government agents found the Inigo and Variety Jones discussions among "hundreds" of chat logs, journal entries, business spreadsheets and other "damning" files in Ulbricht's Samsung 700Z laptop on the day of his arrest, Turner said.
