The Dread Pirate Roberts was never going to persuade Wall Street to love bitcoin. Maybe John Mack can.
Roberts was the swashbuckler alter ego of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the multimillion-dollar Silk Road online bazaar who’s serving a life sentence for allowing customers to use bitcoin to buy drugs, hacking tools and fake identification. Ulbricht’s was the early, ominous face of the cryptocurrency and no one on Wall Street wanted to touch it. What investors can no longer ignore is the incredible price gains almost 150% alone this year for bitcoin. Yet the problem of how to buy and sell digital assets while keeping compliance departments happy remains.