Wired has quite a long piece on Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht [1], definitely a good read.
> Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google.
That's not true. I've had a few onions that Google indexed, via various tor2web proxies.
> To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software.
OK, that's technically correct. But why not just say "Tor"?
> Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, ...
It wasn't anonymous, because you had to create an account, associate it with a Bitcoin address, and provide a mailing address to sellers. And Bitcoin payments are not at all "traceless", unless you mix adequately and use Tor.