Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

Post by arcadeparade » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

stevewillows wrote: post #35

“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.

Post by arcadeparade » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #49

chrischen wrote: post #14

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.

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 exp…

Post by michaelt » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:28 PM UTC

tankbot wrote: post #45

logn wrote: post #38

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 altern…

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.

Post by Torgo » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:48 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #60

dobbsbob wrote: post #17

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…

> 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 ma…

Post by dmix » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:57 PM UTC

mw6621 wrote: post #66

dmix wrote: post #9

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 hav…

I think you mean Timothy May, Cypherpunks founder? AFAIK John Young runs Cryptome.