Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road | Hacker News Reader

Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

forbes.com

276 pointscgi_man129 comments

The name Dread Pirate Roberts should've given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read/watched Princess Bride.

This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press. History shows all blackmarket admins like Max Vision go down shortly after press articles come out with interviews. Now he went from guy running a drug site to "subverting the US with propaganda" so the NSA can get involved. Note to future outlaws: resist the temptation to make yourself famous by giving interviews. Just look how they amped the Swartz case after he went to the media

Can also now make a pretty good profile of this guy because he talks too much on his own forum and to forbes.

Note to future outlaws: resist the temptation to make yourself famous by giving interviews.

Desire for fame seems to be a common theme in the downfalls of otherwise very successful individuals involved in this sort of undercover operation.

> The name Dread Pirate Roberts should've given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read/watched Princess Bride.

It did, and that has been pointed out literally since the start. It's one thing to know that the name suggests the ownership could change hands at any time, and quite another to have the current DPR state that this is so and when he took over.

> This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press.

What makes chatting with a reporter on the SR forums any more damning or fatal than, say, a _Gawker_ article going viral years ago and inspiring US Senators to publicly condemn the site and call for its busting?

I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.

>I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.

Exactly. Everytime DPR gives an interview, it kicks the DEA in the balls and announces to the entire US through the media how inept they are. With this interview they can now go and get greenlighted double the resources to go after him. A guy here who was shipping seeds to the US was the only vendor caught out of dozens of storefonts doing the same thing because he was the only politically active one by funding NORML and other US legalization movements. They singled him out as the target to go after and even mentioned this in their press release after they caught him.

DEA go after low hanging fruit to get more press/funding, and whoever is making them look bad or is political. If you just stay in your quiet corner of the darknet and sell drugs they are more apt to leave you alone for the guy talking to Forbes beacuse there's only so much resources to go around. There's another market, BMR that you never hear much about because he's smart enough not to give interviews even though the site has been talked about in mainstream media articles as well. He learned his lesson saying too much when he closed down his clearnet site and let it slip he was starting BMR. Considering he's still operating without being arrested kind of obvious where the resources are going to (making an example of DPR, if they ever catch him).

Even worse he's calling out his competition which is a big mistake. It's like this guy has zero knowledge of the carding world and all the market vs market attacks that have gone on since the late 1990s. They sold drugs on those sites too

What's the carding world?

People who steal credit cards (usually in industrial quantities, often mag stripe data), then use those credit cards fraudulently. You get credit cards by retail theft (corrupt waitstaff, etc.), site breakins (particularly before PCI and vaulting, when every crappy ecommerce site had a bunch of card data lying around), compromises at network participants like acquirers, corrupt staff, etc.

There are whole communities of people in this space -- it tends to be fairly large and organized groups, since the actual monetization side involves printing a bunch of plastic cards and distributing them to people to make purchases (at retail).

It's related to the ATM skimming/theft/etc. world, and overlaps a lot with "traditional organized crime". Lots of Eastern European presence, too.

Carding sites and forums exist to make a market in credit cards, exploits to get more credit cards, tools to monetize them, etc.

That sounds like a lot of effort and genuine technical skill to invest in crime. If that is true, you have to wonder what motivates people to do it. Is it really profitable enough to be rationally worth the risk if you don't care about the ethics involved, or is it that the people who do it can't find legitimate employment where they live due to the state of the local economy or have personal traits that prevent them from being employed?

2-4% of all credit card transactions are fraudulent. Credit card fraud is a $200B+/year business.

It's extremely lucrative. You can learn and buy everything you need to get started on the open Internet.

1) It's incredibly profitable for some of the participants

2) Until maybe 2007, there were not a whole lot of comparably-profitable licit opportunities for Eastern Europeans. The contract marketplaces have helped. We really need to fix our immigration system in the US (and, worldwide, really) to help more.

3) A lot of the more dangerous parts are essentially blue collar crime; this is FAR safer than drugs/prostitution/human trafficking/terrorism/armed robbery/etc., so it's a clear decision for those guys.

The interviewer didn't even get the operator's first name. I think he (she? they?)'ll be fine.

We know he found a wallet bug so that immediately gives away what level of competency/expertise to look for on the bitcoin forums which he undoubtedly posts there too. How he discovered the site is relevant and will give away how long he has been on bitcointalk since the orig dpr advertised there. We know his book recommendations from the forum which he prob recommended on clearnet in the past, or attached to his FB profile. Theres dozens of other ID markers he's left which I don't think is misinfo, mainly his Libertarian arguments which again he prob repeated elsewhere. Stylometry analysis incoming.

#1 rule to stay out of jail by thegrugq: stop talking

Not to mention, the dude had to have money (even before taking this over) if he said the previous owner was "well compensated".

There is no guarantee that the money is actually available to him. He probably has most / all of it tied up in Bitcoin, and is probably using only small amounts at a time via exchanges.

It is the classic mafia problem. Yes you can make lots of money on the black market, but it is useless if spending means getting caught. Hence money laundering.

This was interesting too, since I always assumed one of the big vendors on the site bought him out but clearly not thanks to his helpful talking.

I bet he raised the money through a group loan, fund or he runs a coin mixing service/mining pool. something that would give you expertise in setting up secure wallets. This is why saying anything is bad unless it's for misinformation only.

DPR clearly hasn't seen the weev court docs where everything he wrote on IRC was used against him to cement a flimsy case

flip side, it could have been a down payment then an 'earn-out' where the former DPR took xx% of revenue until the debt was paid off.

I thought the article said he worked along side of the original owner for some time before buying him out with his share? Or did I misread that part?

I hadn't thought of a few of those tactics. Good thinking. Just goes to show how little data you need acquire identifying information. Still though, I think the interview is fascinating, if possibly revealing.

Are there tools to beat stylometry? Like something that strips all personality out of your writing.

There is: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~pv42/thebiz/ and JStylo https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth

I bet you could scramble it through a translation tool. Though it's probably not the best idea to feed Google your secret messages, there's probably a local solution.

hmm indeed, although that could be predictable and not as random as Jstylo/Anonymouth.

I wouldn't believe any of what DPR said is actually true.

Or he could easily have stolen the book recommendations from absolutely anywhere on the damn planet. Also who cares if he posted on bitcointalk, also do you honestly believe he has a facebook or if he does do you honestly believe there is any overlap between the 2 personas? If so, your recent silk road purchase must have been a humdinger.

Considering the so-called advanced APT1 Chinese state sponsored hacker team was decloaked through facebook cookies I'd say yes. DPR may not be caught through his online gloating or political rhetoric, but they may use it against him in court to shatter whatever defense he's cooked up by linking his words to his IRL identify. Not like people haven't gone to jail over totally circumstantial evidence before (weev).

The way a proper counterintelligence effort goes after someone like this is to develop a list of candidates based on known facts, then use surveillance, statistics, etc to rule people out. I could ID DPR for $500k with a few staff in a year, either by breaking the law or as an official state entitity breaking the laws of other countries.

I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

Failing that go looking for hosting services that accept bitcoin, or online wallet services esp one's coded in php, since this guy has expertise in that area it's logical to assume he's running a hosting front so when the feds come in to seize the servers, he would be the guy they ask to retrieve it. You wouldn't want to trust your multi-million dollar drug site to colocation you'd want to see your server all day and be able to get to it or notice if somebody sabotaged it. He kind of already dropped he had physical control of the server when it crashed once while he was "out of town". Now cash out a lot of your coins and pretend it's for contract services, DDOS, hosting ect. You could also then enjoy plausible deniability, claiming an unknown customer set that site up and it wasn't you. Since your site accepts bitcoins, you have a reason to be using them. All well and good.. unless you talk too much and drop intel on yourself so they can use other circumstantial evidence against you in court.

He would also have to launder and sell all those coins. If I were him I'd be selling them directly to buyers in an underserved country using a decoy clearnet fixed-rate exchange, or I'd also be running my own small exchange and dumping coins in it, using fake ID scans and paying for traffic to simulate customer records. I'd probably also run my own mixing service like bitfog, lending service, or online casino/betting site to help launder them. If there's any large bitcoin investment funds still around I'd be all over that too, getting new coins out from other investors and giving them my SR coins.

Feds can identify the operators of all the above and then compare them to identity markings DPR has dropped on himself. Anybody with a 60% or higher chance of fitting the profile mark them for long term surveillance they will slip up eventually. Feds already know all of this.. which is why you need to be incredibly careful and never get too comfortable running the world's biggest outlaw darkmarket. Satoshi is a good example of excellent OPSEC. Never once did he stray from the topic of development of bitcoin. There is only 1 post in his entire bitcointalk history that does and it was when he chastised some idiots who wanted to sign up Wikileaks back in 2010 for donations, warning them Bitcoin would be killed before it could even start. He certainly didn't talk about politics with the exception of his genesis block comment. He also seemed to have had chosen a fictitious personality and slid in and out of it confusing anybody trying to go after him. Every unique phrase or word he wrote was analyzed then looked for in old whitepapers and mailing lists... nothing.

He also doesn't give interviews

>I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

You would not want to run a heavily used hidden service that you want to remain hidden right beside an exit node. That would be foolish.

I wouldn't want to run a long-lived service which attracted serious attention on an onion routed network. You could get some initial protection by terminating the onion frontend traffic on "tamper resistant, untraceable, throwaway nodes", and then backhaul (maybe via Tor?), to other servers, etc. The frontends would be able to do some local processing to maybe break up the traffic somewhat.

All of this kind of stuff would impair site reliability. IMO, if SR went down more often, I'd have a higher opinion of the paranoid exhibited by the admins. A highly reliable underground site is usually either 1) run by people who are going to get caught or 2) run by people who are doing the catching. There's I guess 3) run by really exceptional people who are doing it as a political statement -- generally unlikely, but in this case, possible.

> He also doesn't give interviews

Unless he's DPR.

This almost sounds like what happens at the start of Vernor Vinge's True Names a book written in late 1970s and still relevant.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

The kinds of things he is saying are very widely espoused by people of similar mindset. If you were trying to profile based on political beliefs and agitation he could easily be me.

(he isn't, for what that's worth, I personally know thousands of others that fit in the exact same category and I am sure there are many, many more.)

>[You] personally know thousands of others that fit in the exact same category.

"personally know thousands". Let that sink in.

I guess I should clarify what I mean by that;

I do not physically interact with the people in question on a regular basis in meatspace, but the mindset is basically the bedrock of near every anarcho capitalist focused community in existence, and within this sphere I have regularly observed at least that many frequent participants on discussions.

So the idea that the position held is useful in identifying who that person might actually be based on its rarity is not very plausible. Unless all those people are actually just sock puppets I suppose?

Robin Dunbar disagrees with this huge monkeysphere

> This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press.

Naw, the interview was on the forums and via PM. I'd be more worried about his book club entropy than the interview

For those not aware, the Forbes author of this article wrote a book on the history of cypherpunks (including the mailing list) which Dread Pirate Roberts was most likely a part of, or the very least inspired by it's members in some way: http://www.amazon.com/This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers...

Having interviewed Timothy May, Cryptome founder and Phil Zimmermann is probably how he earned enough reputation to have this interview set up.

I think you mean Timothy May, Cypherpunks founder?

AFAIK John Young runs Cryptome.

Correct, I wrote "Cryptome founder" as I figured that was more well known than John Young's name. Although I see now how the comma placement in my comment was confusing.

Incorrect comma usage, actually. You can't omit the Oxford comma (the comma before an "and") with a list of exactly 3 items. If you do, the middle item in the list can be parsed too many different ways, as happened here.

I beg to differ. I don't see how an oxford comma would fix this confusion. In fact I think without it his statement is easier to understand. We can easily see he means three people. If he used the Oxford comma the second person would look identical to a preposition and would make your parents comment more valid.

The easiest way to fix the sentence is to put the least precise term at the end + using the oxford comma.

> Having interviewed Timothy May, Phil Zimmermann, and Cryptome founder is probably how (…).

This article was announced before hand and there's been some debate about how it will affect the price of BTC. BTC has already been on the up in the last 48 hours so it'll be interesting to see if this compounds that growth.

"I'd like forewarn everyone that in about 5 days an article will be published that is likely to generate a lot of buzz around Silk Road and attract new people to the site. New information about me, the site and many things will be discussed and I have no doubt that it will produce some controversy. I will be available to answer your questions here on the forums, and hopefully we'll have a fruitful discussion."

BTC exchange prices have been shown to be proportional to the amount of news that BTC receives.

With Texas making it a currency, NY subpoenaing BTC superusers, and now this article, the BTC prices are going to go up for a bit.

There are a handful of exchanges that allow you to short now, so you could probably make some shorts for two weeks from now.

I'm pretty sure the government is delighted by Silk Road so that they can finally justify searching all physical mail in some very advanced way. HN, you're always asking for startup ideas, why not just get totally evil and invent technology to scan physical mail at scale and hook it into PRISM? You'd stand to make at least millions if you did it right. Oh, and part of doing it right is making sure there's some alternate not-so-evil use case you can demo, like idk, automatically adding grandma's birthday cards to your facebook feed and automatically depositing her checks into your checking account.

> I'm pretty sure the government is delighted by Silk Road so that they can finally justify searching all physical mail in some very advanced way.

Aside from the issue that SR has been running for almost 3 years now without anyone introducing such legislation - they already scan the outsides of all letters or packages indefinitely, and can easily search anytime they want to. The legal niceties aren't why drugs by mail still work, it's because the USPS alone handles literally billions of things a year and the screening problem (economical, not too high false positive, USPS does not benefit in any way) is really hard.

The government* is also trying to kill USPS by placing unreasonable pension requirements on it. Sort of hard to justify that when you actually start needing it to fight crime.

*The people elected to run it.

Considering the level of access that government agency's have it is amazing to me that they have not been more effective in clamping down on the drugs trade. Considering the amount of goods and money that is flowing; does that not leave a detectable trace? Is it really that difficult to find?

I don't have the links handy, but it's well know that mail has been photographed for years and it seems likely that PRISM or some gov database is already ingesting this information. Seems like an easy step to upgrade the camera to something that attempts to scan contents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma...

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Envelopes have been photographed for years. The worry is that they'll start scanning package contents.

Just have to photograph them at higher wavelengths. 390-700nm is fine and all, but somewhere around 10nm or so should do the trick...

Perhaps there could be a market on SR for little pieces of x-ray sensitive photographic film. Customers could pay providers a slight premium to include the film in the shipment. If the customer discovers that the film was exposed, they know that they've fallen onto somebodies radar.

“Silk Road doesn’t really sell drugs. It sells insurance and financial products,” says Carnegie Mellon computer engineering professor Nicolas Christin. “It doesn’t really matter whether you’re selling T-shirts or cocaine. The business model is to commoditize security.”

I thought this was an interesting look at it. In a sense Silk Road is like the Pirate Bay in that it doesn't hold the items it generates traffic from.

Well, it becomes pretty obvious when you look at how SR actually operates: why don't sellers just post a list of products on a forum or wiki and buyers send them bitcoins? Because there would be no form of escrow or feedback tracking or interventions by third-parties or bonds required of sellers; with pseudonymous identities and irrevocable payments, it'd be an incredibly tempting lemon market. It's those additional features which turn it into a working marketplace.

Further reading: http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#silk-road-as-a-marketplace

Interesting link, particularly the part about ways law enforcement might try to shut down SR. One approach police might take is to set up shop as sellers, and then instead of running a scam, actually ship the illicit goods and have the police show up right after the mailman. If I understand correctly, the buyer's address must go to the seller instead of the SR admins.

This might be considered entrapment, but if the buyer seeks out SR themselves and gets unlucky in their choice of seller, entrapment might be hard to argue.

The US is already doing something similar for potential terrorists - - they essentially handhold people they believe to have the potential to carry out a terrorist plot. This American Life had an episode called The Convert [1] and Rolling Stones had a similar article [2]

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/471/t...

[2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/...

Most people will only buy from established sellers with a history of good reviews. To my knowledge, those reviews cannot be readily faked. It would be possible for LE to create a number of seller accounts, slowly build up a good reputation, and then bust a bunch of people across the country within a day or two (before news spread). That immediately fails a cost-benefit analysis.

Yes, that's one approach, but I think it'd be a major logistical challenge to coordinate with every single local police department whose zip code you happen to be shipping to. Easier to just scam customers and not deliver. :)

So you have a marketplace now for illegal (stolen) digital products and one for illegal physical products. What other illegal marketplaces will crop up because of tor and bitcoin?

The Pirate Bay is not a marketplace, nor did its origin had anything to do with Tor or Bitcoin.

Tor != Torrent.

Interesting. I have had a theory that DPR is Satoshi (who invented Bitcoin): https://plus.google.com/100577178258662783679/posts/76UcUX4P...

But now DPR claims he inherited the site from someone else. DPR could be trying to disassociate himself from the "Satoshi" identity :)

The original DPR was pretty naive, he was selling on his own site with his girlfriend and didn't make any bones about people knowing. He had to hire a lot of help in the early days when the site took off because he didn't know what he was doing, Satoshi would know.

I still remember the SR job ads for database admins and other positions. I always assumed dozens of feds signed up for them.

Satoshi would never give an interview like this. He hated drawing unnecessary attention to Bitcoin.

The name "Dread Pirate Roberts" is (quite cleverly, IMHO) picked up from the character from The Princess Bride [aside: go watch the film -- it's great fun!].

It is possible that this "person" is much like Satoshi Nakamoto, given that in The Princess Bride, the pirate is not actually one person, but a series of individuals who periodically pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Pirate_Roberts

The article states that exactly.

Oh dear, you're right -- the article has two pages! I was a little puzzled to see no mention of the origin of the name at first.

Or a small group of people. If they agreed on things such as writing styles each person would be individually more anonymous.

The Dread Pirate's curse is that he'll never be able really spend much of this pile of currency that he's accumulated, at least not without drawing attention to himself and getting busted.

History has shown that these guys eventually get busted but rarely for drug dealing; it's usually the IRS that busts them for tax evasion. If you're buying fancy cars, big houses, yachts, or businesses, eventually someone is going to catch on and follow the money trail.

I imagine in a year or three he'll settle down and live like a king in Patagonia :)

Regarding the money exfiltration, from what I recall, there are several money laundering "consultants" active on SR, there was a relatively recent interview[1] with someone who goes by StExo there. As with any illegal market, there are parties of varying levels of sophistication, from the guy who sells $100/week of weed to large organised groups with tens of members, drop houses, front companies, etc.

The (comparatively simple) problem faced by SR is converting BTC to hard currency. The harder part that both large SR vendors and physical drug traffickers have to contend with is obscuring the source and getting it onto the books as legitimate income they can pay tax on and pay themselves wages/dividends/whatever with.

But that isn't a new problem, and organised crime has clearly been doing it at scale for a while, and I can quite imagine professionals in the financial and business sectors who specialise in getting away with it.

[1] http://weirderweb.com/tag/stexo/

It's worse. BTC transactions are eternal and only one really expensive bit of big data shuffling away from being fully mappable as they touch named real people. So as this guy spends BTC, he's leaving footprints, narrowing the search space by connecting himself to things and to people. That metadata is very likely to be what outs him.

From all the online busts I've seen since Shadowcrew busts and countless other illegal forums and markets after it the #1 downfall was letting federal agents become co-administrators and worm their way into the fold. From there they can engage suspects in supposedly confidential/trusted chatter and find out everything there is to know about them. Criminals love to brag and talk their way into jail.

This is easy to do. As a federal agent, sabotage the market with spam, ddos or security breaches, then be johnny on the spot with the solution offering your helpful services. Gain trust, engage in talk, bust everybody.

Depends on the country you live in, and whether you're willing to relocate to spend your money. A lot of countries will look the other way if you invest a reasonable amount of money into developing their economy or people.

There are also many, many ways of laundering your money.

Given that he is a libertarian and a freedom fighter and all that, he could be donating a lot of his coins.

I heard he's buying a car wash operation or two.

Breaking Bad reference on HN?

As someone who doesn't know much about Bitcoins: Could he just say he mined a bunch of Bitcoins a few years ago and is now cashing out?

Well if there asking him questions chances are already following transactions, and its very easy to tell if coins have been mined and maybe shuffled around a few times vs coins with long blockchain history.

Not credibly; the transaction flow of mining looks very different from SR.

Sure, but only up to a point. How are you going to explain how you mined a billion dollars worth of Bitcoins? What equipment did you use for that? Do you have receipts? How did you pay for /that/ equipment?

I agree with the previous reply that he might find a nation to shelter him but the US government is going to do anything they can to get at him there. Look at the success we've had in shutting down al Qaeda's financial arms and seizing their assets worldwide. If the US government can't get at his money directly, it will assert tremendous pressure on someone who can.

When zerocoin is implemented things in this space will change a lot.

I personally think any technology such as zerocoin that can mask the transaction path 100% would increase the value of the currency by 100x

>If Roberts is paranoid, it’s because very powerful people really are out to get him.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!

Certainly he has justification. Also, clever use of a Princess Bride quote.

Inconceivable!

Not at all, paranoia is simply a mistrust without justification. One can be cautionary and paranoid at the same time.

There are formalized medical definitions of paranoia being a mental condition, but many words have informal definitions that complement their formal definitions.

>Not at all, paranoia is simply a mistrust without justification.

So does he or doesn't he have justification to be mistrustful? The quoted sentence claims the former.

>many words have informal definitions that complement their formal definitions.

Yea, I wouldn't have made the post without checking the informal definition first.

> Bitcoin-like digital currency system called Liberty Reserve

No, it's really not. That's about analogous to "absinthe-like drink called Coca-Cola."

Can the Bitcoin Foundation sue for defamation?

How isn't it? They're both drinks, and slightly poisonous... they're both digital currency, and as far as any laymen could tell, used exclusively by criminals.

Oh sure, you can tell me about "mining" and crypto, but that's not relevant right now. What, if anything, actually sets Bitcoin apart from LIberty Reserve?

Do you really believe that the CEO of Paypal[1] and Western Union[2] would contemplate in public the possibility of using Bitcoin as a funding mechanism if it were used exclusively by criminals?

1. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/04/30/could-paypal-be-on-ho... 2. http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/western-union-bitcoin/

Liberty Reserve got shut down. Bitcoin can't be shut down.

To the laymen you referenced: https://bitcoinstore.com

If anything : decentralized vs centralized currency.

For the laymen : Nobody owns Bitcoin. Liberty Reserve owned Liberty Reserve.

It's as simple as it gets.

(a) LR was just a company - a company that may have engaged in all kinds of illegal things. Bitcoin is a technology based on a white paper and open source software.

(b) Bitcoin has many legitimate and legal uses.

(c) Bitcoin has unique and useful properties that are not possible with a private (LR) or fiat (e.g. USD) currency, such as having a fixed total supply.

If you are struggling to pin an ideology on an enterprise like the Silk Road, consider ways in which our current rate of technological/scientific progress has been shaped and guided by the responsible use of psychedelics in the 20th century. Check out the relationships that Francis Crick, Kary Mullis, Steve Jobs and Kiyoshi Izumi had with these fascinating compounds to start. From there it is not difficult for one to rationally assert that Silk Road (and Roberts) are critical facilitators - spurring innovation by furnishing those that might conceptualize the future with a powerful means to do so.

I'm surprised he continues to have a relatively high profile, if he truly is responsible for running silk road. The more linkable things you do, the greater the risk of your pseudonym being compromised.

I understand that he's commercially motivated to promote the site, but having a third party do that would make a lot more sense. As the site's admin, he's both a big legal and technical liability if identified; an independent promoter would not be.

There's absolutely no reason to believe Dread Pirate Roberts isn't the third party you mention.

They allude to just that in the article. DPR is not the founder of SilkRoad.

Whether it's a victimless crime or not depends on where they source the drugs.

You could argue that aggressive law-enforcement is what causes reprisal violence, but that still wouldn't justify supporting it in another way.

So I smoke normal, legal cigarettes. About 10 a day, 20 when I'm stressed. I started about 20, borrowing them off friends, and it's been maybe 8 years now.

The first 2 years, I didn't realize I was addicted to them. I just smoked when I wanted, which was between every lecture and with my friends in the evening. Then I tried to stop.

Quitting smoking is weird because sometimes you can just stop, and don't feel the need to smoke (until a couple months later you get drunk and buy a pack).

Other times, it's really hard. As in horrible. Your brain is trying to trick you into doing it. Telling you that your girlfriend (who asked you to stop) will leave you if you don't have one and calm down. Telling you that you haven't seen (smoking friend) in a long time. Just like you can't perceive your blindspot, you can't spot your own irrationality. This, I think, is the biggest reason smokers don't quit. It's relatively easy to fend off cravings, but recognizing irrational, addiction driven thought is hard.

Anyway, so one day I'm in a medical stats class. The lecturer is making a joke about a graph. It seems to show smoking is protective against prostate cancer. Smokers are super unlikely to die of prostate cancer. It looks convincing. Smokers don't survive to die of prostate cancer. It convinces me not to smoke again. I make my way downstairs, and grab a bagel. I have an exam next period, and I'm behind in that class. I can't focus without a cigarette. I light up, and keep lighting up, and now it's 5 years later, and I'm not going to die of prostate cancer.

There is this idea that humans are rational entities capable of making free choices, but we know they are really, really not. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, a great (nobel prize winning) economics book explains that there are situations where humans predictably make bad choices. Addictions are one of these. If I were not hooked on cigarettes, as a smart, otherwise disciplined person, I'd be more sympathetic with this libertarians on drugs.

"If I were not hooked on cigarettes, as a smart, otherwise disciplined person, I'd be more sympathetic with this libertarians on drugs."

Ok, then... if you could do any political change in the society without stripping essential freedoms, what change do you think would be most effective in stopping/alleviating the drug problem? It seems to me that the best way would be to legalize them all: it would make it possible to control the supply, detect problem cases, remove a lot of criminal markets and thus actual crimes with victims, and get more taxes. Even the "think of the children!" aspect seems to be better covered by this, since it's quite a lot easier to enforce ID checks in legal shops.

@drivebyacct2: I'm hoping what you read wasn't what I meant. I meant that, I can't agree with the view that people should have the right to decide what they put in their bodies, because it is based on the idea they are making a rational decision. As addictive substances is a situation where people repeatably make irrational, bad choices, then that can't hold.

Like a lot of startupers know most new companies crash, but believe they are different, I believe that I will quite smoking one day (just never today). So I don't need protection. Obviously. But other people do. Hopefully I'm someone elses other people.

>I can't agree with the view that people should have the right to decide what they put in their bodies, because it is based on the idea they are making a rational decision.

No, it isn't. It's based on the idea that people have a right to make their own decisions, rational or not. You obviously disagree.

You realize that "The government knows what's best for you, and must therefore prohibit independent decision-making" is the exact opposite of freedom, and more closely associated with authoritarianism and tyranny, right?

See, you are trying to say that there are two possible positions - either the government is allowed to interfere with peoples lives, or it is not.

Most people believe something in the middle - there are situations where they would like the government to interfere. For instance, if they pay you for a service, and you don't deliver it, they might want the government to take action against you. In this case, you could argue they are wrong, there are alternative mechanisms (e.g. escrow, reputation damage).

But there are situations where only potentially violent action will help - e.g. theft. In the lawless world of Bitcoin, theft is a constant concern, much less so than in the real world where a man with a gun is just a phonecall away. Could we maintain a society like this without any enforcement of law? Really?

So, if you allow me for a moment government interference in matters of murder and theft, maybe you will allow me interference in matters of identity theft. Then of fraud?

So most people end up willing to trade freedom for security to some extent. (And it matters little what they deserve. The world doesn't work like that). I guess you can choose your level of tradeoff by moving to Somalia or Singapore, or not moving.

My tradeoff level is 'I think the government should prevent people being harmed by predictable irrational behavior'. That's why I support an age of consent, an age of criminal responsibility, regulation of harmful addictive substances, and socialized mental health care.

You may not. I hear it's sunny in Somalia. If you move, I'd love to stay on your couch for a bit.

> there are situations where they would like the government to interfere

> Could we maintain a society like this without any enforcement of law?

> I think the government should prevent people being harmed by predictable irrational behavior

So it seems you believe that a government is a monopoly on force, but think it's a good thing. a very interesting viewpoint.

How is that different from the famous quote [1] from 1984 about the picture of the future? I appreciate that this might be considered a slippery slope argument, but have you seen a benevolent monopoly before? I'm not sure I have.

[1] http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3041

>>have you seen a benevolent monopoly before?

I write too much, but you make an interesting point. More interesting because I find it hard to imagine a world where governments do not have a monopoly on force and the things function. Clearly, I need to think harder/better.

Well, producing child pornography is a crime that is inherently victim-ful. (I do not include cartoon CP here)

Producing drugs today happens to have victims because of social policies etc, but those aren't inherent to the act of producing the drug.

There are victims in the production of certain modern day goods (like electronics, clothes, etc.) but that doesn't mean that manufacturing iPhones necessarily leads to exploited Chinese workers. (although one could make the argument that selling iPhones at the price that they are sold for today cannot be realistically achieved without having Foxconn-style factories)

Like I said, regardless of whether it's inherently victim-ful, the sale and support still produces those victims in a consistent and predictable manner.

Law enforcement knows drug consumers will continue to consume drugs and drug cartels will continue to be violent, so if they don't change their behavior, they are responsible for the violence they cause.

From another perspective, drug consumers know drug cartels will continue to be violent, and that drug enforcement agencies will continue to enforce. From their perspective, if drug consumers don't change their consumption patterns, they are at fault for the violence.

If none of the parties change their stance, everything stays the same. Consumers blame the government for drug crackdowns, the government blames consumers for consuming and supporting.

Everyone is at fault. The practical way to look at this is how do you effect change with the least amount of effort? Is it easier to create legislation that change the government stance on drugs, or is it easier to do a public opinion campaign to change opinions on drug consumption? Seeing as how drug addicts are rational about their drug use (aside from dopamine=good), it's probably easier to pass legislation.

To quote Chomsky, 'ever product made in a capitalist society requires some level of coercion', from Chinese Iphones to Colombian cocaine.

That is a lie though. If I pick up a rock and somebody else does as well and we both use our hands to break off pieces of the rock (private means of production) and trade parts of the broken rocks with each no coercion occurred.

That is technically a capitalist society without coercion.

That is not a capitalist society by any definition I know of. Capitalism involves things like land ownership and interest-bearing loans, things that eventually lead to significant inequality in the distribution of resources.

In a capitalist society, the other guy owns all the rocks, and if you try breaking one without his permission he might call the cops and have you jailed. But he's a reasonable guy, and if you're willing to break rocks for 14 hours a day, he'll pay you ten cents per piece, and then you can buy one back from him for thirty!

Says the anarchist with his own 3 GHz computer.

Why doesn't he go ahead and state the logical extension of that, which is that every product made in any organized society requires some level of coercion? Chomsky is long on criticisms of capitalism but short on suggestions for replacing it.

Illumination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxYth0ktPsY

Contrary to the article, the AMA on Reddit has not been deleted

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fwi48/im_the_ceo_of_a...

The article stated some comments had been deleted, not the whole AMA.

> Then, last month, the FBI exploited a vulnerability in Tor to capture the alleged administrator of a child pornography site in Ireland.

Freedom hosting now reduced to being simply a child pornography site.

Might silk road be the largest working example of agorism to date? Fascinating how they create a network where buyers can comfortably evaluate their options with the help of hundreds of reviews, and then order from the safety of their home.

Would Wikipedia or Craigslist qualify?

Silk Road is an interesting indicator of whether online privacy can be maintained against a powerful and determined adversary. If it’s still running in five years time, that will suggest that it may be possible.

I would bet that it won’t.

If he setup silkroadlink.com, isn't that a money trail?

WHOIS information for silkroadlink.com:*

[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com] [Redirected to whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com] [Querying whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com] [whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com] Registration Service Provided By: BITDOMAIN.BIZ Domain Name: SILKROADLINK.COM Registration Date: 04-Jul-2013 Expiration Date: 04-Jul-2014 Status:LOCKED Note: This Domain Name is currently Locked. This feature is provided to protect against fraudulent acquisition of the domain name, as in this status the domain name cannot be transferred or modified. Name Servers: ns1.bitdomain.biz ns2.bitdomain.biz ns3.bitdomain.biz ns4.bitdomain.biz

Registrant Contact Details: N/A Link Thompson (linkthompson@tormail.org) Ave. Federico Boyd Edif. Torre, Universal Piso 8 Panama City Panamá,74678 PA Tel. +507.2638480 Administrative Contact Details: N/A Link Thompson (linkthompson@tormail.org) Ave. Federico Boyd Edif. Torre, Universal Piso 8 Panama City Panamá,74678 PA Tel. +507.2638480 Technical Contact Details: N/A Link Thompson (linkthompson@tormail.org) Ave. Federico Boyd Edif. Torre, Universal Piso 8 Panama City Panamá,74678 PA Tel. +507.2638480 Billing Contact Details: N/A Link Thompson (linkthompson@tormail.org) Ave. Federico Boyd Edif. Torre, Universal Piso 8 Panama City Panamá,74678 PA Tel. +507.2638480

No, there's likely no money trail, because he almost certainly used Bitcoins to register the domain. I mean, look at the registrar.

Not really. Even assuming you can trace back the Bitcoin payment, it's not even clear DPR wrote the page (as opposed to hired someone to write it for him) - read it, it's written in a weird third-person with spelling errors and crap.

Looks like a bogus address with only a real email in Tor-land. Domain is paid with Bitcoin through bitdomain.biz, so that's a dead end too.

If i bought a domain trough bitdomain.biz and somehow i have problems with it (like getting stolen the password, somebody else claiming it), how can they verify that i am the person that bought originally the domain.

You could send them an email signed with the private key that you originally paid with (Bitcoin has a message signature feature in the GUI).

Edit: see here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223713.0

A hash of the bitcoin used?

This was really a fascinating article.

This passage bugged me :

".. was grossing $1.2 million a month in the first half of 2012. Since then the site has doubled its product listings, and revenue now hits an annual run-rate of $30 million to $45 million by FORBES’ estimate."

I guess 1.2M/month -> (30M - 45M)/yr makes the growth like much higher than :

1.2M/month -> (2.5 - 3.75M)/month 14.4M/yr -> (30M - 45M)/yr

Maybe he should have written revenue increasing is from 1.2M/month to 45,000,0000 per year.

Maybe the author made the whole thing up?

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