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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to speculate that the name of the founder(s) is a small hint towards them being US-Americans:

The Dread Pirate Roberts is a fictional character from The Princess Bride (book and movie), who in the novel turns out to be not one person, but a title given from one retiring pirate to the next successor because it's easier to work as a pirate when everybody is scared of you.

In this case, it's a fun way to hint that Silk Road is not operated by a single person, but by a group from what I think are US-Americans. There I merely speculate: I think the movie was a success in the US but not much in any other country. In fact, the only people who've quoted the movie to me are US-Americans.

Can people from other countries weigh in on this? Would non-Americans choose this as a pseudonym?

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The Princess Bride is extremely popular among 20-40 year olds in the Anglosphere. Australia, Canada, USA, UK.

This narrows down your search for the Dread Pirate Roberts to like 150 million people. So the fact that this English speaking Silk Road founder is from the English speaking world and was probably a child or teenager in the 80s is not really narrowing it down much.

150 million people out of 7.079 billion possible candidates? In my view that is narrowing it down a lot!

It does narrow it down, but not to any useful level. For all intents and purposes, trying to pick someone from a pool of 150 million vs 7 billion is essentially the same level of impossible.

Really interesting article on using information theory to narrow down suspects of crime: http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity

That is pretty interesting. The wikipedia edit time example is particularly revealing. The AC hum stuff is truly fascinating!

The number of possible candidates is not the total population of the planet, but rather the number of people on the planet who have the knowledge and skills required to operate such a site.

He could also be from outside the English speaking world and just studied or grew up there.

The 2004 remake of Sid Meiers Pirates also mentioned the name "Dread Pirate Roberts", or fairly close to where the character Bart Roberts refered to himself as "The dread pirate Bart Roberts".

A fairly popular game (and highly pirated) its also possible the name was picked from it.

Nah, the prevailing wisdom among old-timers on SR is that he's from Europe. There were obvious clues early on as to what country he's from, given that DPR was once a seller on the site.

> I think the movie was a success in the US but not much in any other country.

There was also a book.

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