Jury deliberations began in the trial of the alleged operator of the online black market website known as Silk Road. The prosecutors claim that Ross Ulbricht, 30, was the mastermind behind a scheme that enabled about $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

A federal judge in Manhattan dispatched the 6 men and 6 women on the jury to consider the fate of the suspected website operator. So far, Ross faces 7 counts, including drugs trafficking. Being accused of running the Silk Road website under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, the young man faces up to life sentence if convicted.

The illegal marketplace existed online from at least January 2011 to October 2013. Finally, the law enforcement authorities managed to seize the site and arrest Ross Ulbricht at a public library in San Francisco.

Over the 33 months of the site’s operation, Silk Road had generated almost $214 million in sales and $13 million in commissions, according to prosecutors. While Ross Ulbricht did concede that he was the Silk Road creator, his lawyer claimed that the service was initially launched as a “freewheeling, free market website” to trade anything except a few harmful items. His lawyer also claims that after Ulbricht’s experiment became too stressful for him, as the site grew and expanded, Ross eventually handed it off to other operators and became their “fall guy” in the end. Ulbricht insists that the Silk Road’s true operators lured him back toward the end of the site.