Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

The name Dread Pirate Roberts should&#x27;ve given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read&#x2F;watched Princess Bride.<p>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 &quot;subverting the US with propaganda&quot; 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<p>Can also now make a pretty good profile of this guy because he talks too much on his own forum and to forbes.

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&#x27;s members in some way: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers/dp/0525953205/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers...</a><p>Having interviewed Timothy May, Cryptome founder and Phil Zimmermann is probably how he earned enough reputation to have this interview set up.

This article was announced before hand and there&#x27;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&#x27;ll be interesting to see if this compounds that growth.<p>&quot;I&#x27;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&#x27;ll have a fruitful discussion.&quot;

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d stand to make at least millions if you did it right. Oh, and part of doing it right is making sure there&#x27;s some alternate not-so-evil use case you can demo, like idk, automatically adding grandma&#x27;s birthday cards to your facebook feed and automatically depositing her checks into your checking account.

“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.”<p>I thought this was an interesting look at it. In a sense Silk Road is like the Pirate Bay in that it doesn&#x27;t hold the items it generates traffic from.

Interesting. I have had a theory that DPR is Satoshi (who invented Bitcoin): <a href="https://plus.google.com/100577178258662783679/posts/76UcUX4Py2c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;100577178258662783679&#x2F;posts&#x2F;76UcUX4P...</a><p>But now DPR claims he inherited the site from someone else. DPR could be trying to disassociate himself from the &quot;Satoshi&quot; identity :)

The name &quot;Dread Pirate Roberts&quot; is (quite cleverly, IMHO) picked up from the character from The Princess Bride [<i>aside</i>: go watch the film -- it&#x27;s great fun!].<p>It is possible that this &quot;person&quot; 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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Pirate_Roberts" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dread_Pirate_Roberts</a>

The Dread Pirate&#x27;s curse is that he&#x27;ll never be able really spend much of this pile of currency that he&#x27;s accumulated, at least not without drawing attention to himself and getting busted.<p>History has shown that these guys eventually get busted but rarely for drug dealing; it&#x27;s usually the IRS that busts them for tax evasion. If you&#x27;re buying fancy cars, big houses, yachts, or businesses, eventually someone is going to catch on and follow the money trail.

&gt;If Roberts is paranoid, it’s because very powerful people really are out to get him.<p>You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

&gt; Bitcoin-like digital currency system called Liberty Reserve<p>No, it&#x27;s really not. That&#x27;s about analogous to &quot;absinthe-like drink called Coca-Cola.&quot;<p>Can the Bitcoin Foundation sue for defamation?

If you are struggling to pin an ideology on an enterprise like the Silk Road, consider ways in which our current rate of technological&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>I understand that he&#x27;s commercially motivated to promote the site, but having a third party do that would make a lot more sense. As the site&#x27;s admin, he&#x27;s both a big legal and technical liability if identified; an independent promoter would not be.

Whether it&#x27;s a victimless crime or not depends on where they source the drugs.<p>You could argue that aggressive law-enforcement is what causes reprisal violence, but that still wouldn&#x27;t justify supporting it in another way.

Contrary to the article, the AMA on Reddit has not been deleted<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fwi48/im_the_ceo_of_an_online_underground_black_market/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1fwi48&#x2F;im_the_ceo_of_a...</a>

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

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.<p>I would bet that it won’t.

If he setup silkroadlink.com, isn&#x27;t that a money trail?<p>WHOIS information for silkroadlink.com:<i></i>*<p>[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<p>Registrant Contact Details: N&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;A Link Thompson (linkthompson@tormail.org) Ave. Federico Boyd Edif. Torre, Universal Piso 8 Panama City Panamá,74678 PA Tel. +507.2638480

This was really a fascinating article.

This passage bugged me :<p>&quot;.. 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.&quot;<p>I guess 1.2M&#x2F;month -&gt; (30M - 45M)&#x2F;yr makes the growth like much higher than :<p>1.2M&#x2F;month -&gt; (2.5 - 3.75M)&#x2F;month 14.4M&#x2F;yr -&gt; (30M - 45M)&#x2F;yr<p>Maybe he should have written revenue increasing is from 1.2M&#x2F;month to 45,000,0000 per year.

Maybe the author made the whole thing up?