8 ms·

Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Silk Road

107 points by gbrindisi 13y ago

b6 13y ago
This guy is doing good work, and I fear for his safety.
- DividesByZero 13y ago
  Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense? Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.
  - wnight 13y ago
    Unless a business in that position attempts to enforce its position, what's the problem? If he is making something easier for others he should be rewarded or he'll stop. It's like saying a road has no value because stuff isn't created on the road, just moved. As for ethics, you could sleep better after buying a kilo of coke on silk road than paying your taxes.
    - DividesByZero 13y ago
      Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.
      - wyager 13y ago
        >Roads are a public good, not a business It's funny how I keep getting charged to drive on certain roads that provide a better service than certain other roads.
        DividesByZero 13y ago
        The owners of such roads are operating rent-seeking businesses. Not in any way a contradiction.
      - jacoblyles 13y ago
        There were lots of private highways and roads in early US history[1]. I'm not saying it's always and everywhere a good idea, but the historical reality or private roads suggests we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_...
      - wnight 13y ago
        I think you're arguing with the mirror. I said it's like [the fallacy of] thinking a road has no value ... And I see a lot of businesses selling stuff like 3d printers who use open designs and contribute changes back to the community. Lock-in is a choice people make.
  - aero142 13y ago
    Morals of being a drug market aside, in what way is SilkRoad a "rent-seeking enterprise" any more than any other transaction facilitating entity? Every transaction has friction and facilitators provide the service of matching buyers and sellers. Maybe not the highest ideal of productivity but hardly deserves to be described as rent-seeking.
    - DividesByZero 13y ago
      You're correct, every business that profits from easing transactional friction is to a greater or lesser extent, rent seeking.
      - omni 13y ago
        Do you have any points to offer other than useless snark? You have multiple comments challenging your initial claim that Silk Road is rent-seeking and you have yet to offer any sort of defense of your position.
      - revelation 13y ago
        Who is creating the majority of friction in the drug trade? Nation states and their war on drugs. Silk Road is using technological advancement to remove as much friction from the process as possible, but it's obviously still non-zero, just like any market in the world.
      - aero142 13y ago
        Well, I guess we just disagree on the definition of rent-seeking. Matching willing buyers and sellers creates value by increasing the satisfaction of both the buyer and the seller since both should be better off after the transaction. The facilitator who creates more mutually beneficial trades is increasing the wellbeing of society as a whole. From wikipedia "Rent-seeking behavior is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking behavior, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." SilkRoad is not rent seeking because they are not looking to change or increase the transaction friction and regulatory control of the drug trade for their own benefit. That is why rent-seeking is usually used to describe entities trying to create a government policy which benefits them but hinders mutual exchange of others. To define rent-seeking is such a loose way as to cover all facilitators who don't produce anything directly is to distort it's original meaning and make the word useless to describe true rent-seeking.
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    Sorry, but you you've got the concept of "rent seeking" completely wrong. "In public choice theory, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking A black market - almost by definition - is one in which the players are cut off from the channels of official lobbying or patronage that make rent-seeking a viable economic strategy. That's not to say that a dark symbiosis can't develop between black marketeers and legitimate authorities. For instance, the police, by enforcing laws against drug trafficking, increase the risks of trafficking. This increases prices and profits alike. High profits attract a constant supply of traffickers, who also tend to be far more ruthless than the average businessman, which brings additional layers of criminality to the trade, thereby ensuring continued employment for the police - to say nothing of an unsettling expansion of their powers. But at no point do the traffickers and the police feel a mutual need to formalize this relationship, since public opinion remains, on balance, opposed to the narcotics trade. That is to say, the police can rely on the ballot box to stay employed, stripping them of any incentive to do business (at least on an open, institutional level) with traffickers. Meanwhile, the traffickers can count on public opinion to keep police on the beat, and need not go to any further expense to keep their racket going. Contrast all this with the retroactive extension of copyright terms which has got to be the canonical example of true rent seeking, illuminating the practice in its most naked and unproductive form. EDIT: An more germane example is the lobbying done by pharmaceutical companies with an interest in keeping the law and public opinion in opposition to illegal substances that may have pharmacological properties. Because these substances are too well known to be patented, their legalization could lead to patent-free formulations that reduce demand for patentable substitutes that pharmaceutical companies have created, or ones they could develop in future. Blocking the legal use of one widely and cheaply available substance to create a market for a more expensive but conceivably inferior alternate is a text-book case of rent seeking.
    - DividesByZero 13y ago
      I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour! You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.
  - b6 13y ago
    Well, through SR, DPR helps all parties involved be safer. For buyers, all products have ratings and reviews, and sellers have overall satisfaction statistics, and there is a forum. For sellers, there are buyer statistics. He's a pioneer. When SR has strange technical problems, he can't just jump on IRC or Stack Overflow and ask. He has to deal with attacks against Tor no one else has experienced. I don't know of anyone else betting more heavily on the security of Tor (at least the hidden service aspect). He's also just plain inspiring. He had a bold idea, coded it up, kept it working, by himself or with a small group, despite opposition by the worst possible adversaries. He puts his life on the line for his principles. If the world had more brave and highly capable people like him, we might not still be in the drug war.
mdelias 13y ago
Submitted this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645665
lenazegher 13y ago
Given the ultimate traceability of bitcoins, would anyone care to speculate how tDPR converts SR's transaction fees into fiat currency without being tracked down by law enforcement?
- adventured 13y ago
  He is law enforcement. His interest is the vendors and mapping the network.
  - youngerdryas 13y ago
    "How can you plug yourself into the tax eating, life sucking, violent, sadistic, war mongering, oppressive machine ever again? How can you kneel when you’ve felt the power of your own legs? Felt them stretch and flex as you learn to walk and think as a free person? I would rather live my life in rags now than in golden chains. And now we can have both! Now it is profitable to throw off one’s chains, with amazing crypto technology reducing the risk of doing so dramatically. How many niches have yet to be filled in the world of anonymous online markets? The opportunity to prosper and take part in a revolution of epic proportions is at our fingertips! I have no one to share my thoughts with in physical space. Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening. I hope my words can be an inspiration just as I am given so much by everyone here." Definitely a cop.
    - adventured 13y ago
      He's definitely not a cop in the sense of a Hollywood movie (eg Miami Vice). He and his team are specialists. They are to cops what the Navy Seals or Rangers are to an Army E1. The primary goal is information. They could care less about busting any given small time vendor. They want a mapping of the network of trade, origination, distribution, communication, transactions and financing. Particularly to draw currently unknown or difficult to track network nodes out into the open. It's the same thing that has been done with paedophilia online. It's a honey trap. There isn't much value in busting single nodes. They want to see how much of the network they can map out, and the leads it provides to larger players. If this concept didn't exist, they'd desperately want to create it. Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.
artas_bartas 13y ago
I was so excited to discover that something like this exist - a community that gets on with its business without any stupid organization or agency putting sticks in its wheels. I just wish this spirit of freedom would come over to countries of the former USSR where it is badly needed.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  I wish it would come to the USA.
mike-cardwell 13y ago
"Do you want to see this thing go all the way and take the absolute piss out of the power mongers of this world" Would anybody other than a Brit say that sentence? [edit] Although I notice a lot of American English spelling in there too.
- skore 13y ago
  > Would anybody other than a Brit say that sentence? You mean like somebody who tried to deliberately obscure his identity by using fake clues?
- patrickk 13y ago
  Brits, Irish and Aussies too I believe. When I read that comment, I thought that Dread Pirate Roberts could be using Libertarian musings (which I've never heard outside of US political discussions) and references to US law enforcement agencies as a smokescreen for his identity. Interestingly, and coincidentally, there's been speculation that the Bitcoin creator (Satoshi Nakamoto) could be an Irish computer science student called Michael Clear, due to British spelling in his (if it is his) written work: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
  - claudius 13y ago
    ‘British’ English is the standard English taught in Europe and the Middle East, likely in India as well, so I doubt that this is a remotely helpful clue.
    - rjknight 13y ago
      "take the absolute piss" is colloquial British English though. I doubt that anyone is actually taught to speak that way.
      - claudius 13y ago
        Correct, I was mostly responding to ‘due to British spelling’ in connection with Nakamoto. The claim that some American spelling crops up in his writing (on the linked-to Wiki site) actually supports the idea that he is neither a native Briton nor American, but learnt British spelling in school and American spelling on the net.
xSwag 13y ago
Why does frobes insist on adding page numbers? For page views? It's terrible reading experience having to click every few paragraphs.
- eksith 13y ago
  Here you go : http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collected-quotations-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts-founder-of-the-drug-site-silk-road-and-radical-libertarian/print/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect... It's beyond obnoxious sometimes when some sites (not Forbes specifically) put just 1-3 paragraphs per page with one image so that each one is effectively a slide surrounded by ads. When I reach my limit of the "paged experience", I search for the printer friendly page. Edit: Er... Looks like Forbes is redirecting to the full "paged experience" upon clicking. Oh well. Just scroll to the bottom and click "print".
  - deno 13y ago
    They redirect based on Referer header. http://pastebin.com/WNmLmKqL http://pastebin.com/WNmLmKqL
- gbrindisi 13y ago
  I've submitted the print version but Forbes is redirecting it to the default view.
- JVIDEL 13y ago
  I use iReader, it automatically converts anything to a one-page article of pure text.
nwh 13y ago
I'm curious how long it will be until this person is turned into an FBI informant (think Lulzsec and Sabu). The website has done some obscenely stupid things in the past, like leaving their real (non-Tor) IP address on error pages. Presumably the website is a large target, even just for it's common mention in media.
- Strom 13y ago
  The beauty of Silk Road design is that the site being a FBI honeypot has been built into the threat model from the start. All identifying info sent between buyers/sellers is encrypted using PGP, Silk Road doesn't see anything.
  - new299 13y ago
    I thought the PGP encryption was optional?
  - nullymcnull 13y ago
    That's not accurate. People are encouraged to use PGP for addresses and other sensitive communication there, but it is not enforced or directly supported by the system. There are still vendors who can't be bothered to figure PGP out (often relying upon dubious alternatives like privnote), and there will always be customers who don't care one way or the other. Silk Road itself doesn't even have a discrete place for users to enter their public key; it is only by convention that most vendors put it at the end of their profile text.
locofacetwice 13y ago
>Here’s the rub: the drug war is an acute symptom of a deeper problem, and that problem is the state. If they “legalize, regulate and tax” it, it’s just one more part of society under their thumb, another productive sector that they can leech off of. But he is doing exactly that, isn't he?
gambiting 13y ago
I agree with some things he says,and some things he says are absolutely stupid. Private police force that you need to pay directly for protection? Reminds me of ancient Rome times, when if your house was on fire, the fire brigade would come and haggle with you first,trying to negotiate how much you are willing to pay to save your house. Having to pay somebody directly(rather than in your taxes) for protection is unfathomably stupid. Right now you can call the police literally anywhere you are in the world, and they will come and help, because that's what they do. With his solution, you could drive to a nearby city and nobody would help you,because you haven't paid the security agency there.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  >and they will come and help the police are not obligated to help you in the US, this has been the subject of at least 2 supreme court cases.
  - gambiting 13y ago
    If I didn't have a good opinion about the US system before, it's getting worse as we speak.
    - dmm 13y ago
      I don't think it's the responsibility of the police to protect you anywhere. By responsibility I mean, if you are not protected you can hold the police legally responsible.
    - derleth 13y ago
      Can you imagine how many police we'd need if there were an obligation to protect everyone at all times? There isn't a country on Earth with police forces that large.
      - gambiting 13y ago
        No, but at the very least I expect them to be legally bound to respond(in any way) to a 911 call, and not be able to just tell people to fuck off.
DividesByZero 13y ago
For someone who paints themselves as some sort of Randian superman, he sure uses the words of collective action and altruism a lot. "It’s paradoxical, but the less you focus on your own happiness and focus on others’, the happier you’ll be." John Galt indeed.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Outside of Ayn Rand novels, collective action is necessary for the livelihood of free peoples. Old-fashioned civic virtue used to fill the roles that the state usurped (see Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, The State"). I have a soft spot in my heart for Ayn Rand, but her moral system would be a poor foundation for a free people (which I am here using as a euphemism for market anarchy).
- icebraining 13y ago
  He's an anarcho-capitalist, not an objectivist. The two groups often disagree on many things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism
subsystem 13y ago
I get so tired of libertarian self-serving mumbo jumbo. He's a drug trafficker, makes large amount of money of it and I have a hard time seeing that any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade. Regardless if I agree with it or not, someone like Cody Wilson has a far better case in my book.
- wyager 13y ago
  > any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade. What "realities of the drug trade"? Any drug sales happening on TSR are by small-time manufacturers and dealers. There are no shootings or stabbings on TSR. The cartels don't have any reason to use TSR. I think the nature of TSR prevents most of the "realities" you're citing.
  - subsystem 13y ago
    Last time I checked SR, if I remember correctly, there were substantial amounts of high-grade cocaine being sold from the south of the US.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      The only way to actually check is to take delivery of it. Which I assume you didn't do. There's lots of reasons to believe the Silk Road is real, but most of them are just assertions from mostly anonymous people.
  - nullymcnull 13y ago
    Indeed. Pretty much all of the ugly 'realities' of the drug trade are those which exist and thrive precisely because drugs are outlawed. SR happens to protect its users from having to deal with most of those realities - and that's a great benefit. DPR rightly deserves praise for helping people to get the drugs of their choice without having to hit the often dangerous streets for them. Perhaps one day western societies will be able to have an adult conversation about drugs, but for the time being shrill reactionaries still set the tone. Meanwhile for every one dramatic walking-cliche of a drug casualty out there killing themselves and making the world shittier, there are at least a handful of responsible drug users conducting perfectly normal and successful lives. For any drug you can name.
cheeseprocedure 13y ago
Is there historical evidence to back the notion that, through market forces, employment standards would rise to meet workers' demands?
- cmhamill 13y ago
  Put plainly, no.
- mr_spothawk 13y ago
  Hong Kong is a good example. You can watch the first episode of Milton Friedman's PBS series "Free to Choose" for more details. *edit for clarity
  - JVIDEL 13y ago
    HK grew off opium trafficking and money laundering, any other examples?
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Growth in wages and better working conditions broadly followed the growth in labor productivity. I see labor protection laws as a lagging indicator of worker well-being that are only passed when a society is rich enough to afford them.
kybernetyk 13y ago
This man/woman is a hero of the free market and I wish him/her all the best.
wfn 13y ago
> Personally, I don’t think they [Bitcoin, Tor] can be effectively banned at this point. Iran and China, for example, are actively trying and failing. That is, unfortunately, not quite true in regards to Tor. Iran has on multiple occasions done/tried out doing (turned it on, then off) traffic censorship that directly or indirectly very much affected Tor. [1] [2] True, Tor managed to roll out obfsfroxy et al., which they'd been already actively developing prior to that, but if e.g. Iran (again) attempted country-wise generic SSL censorship, that would hurt things. Tor's pluggable transports would perhaps be a response to that still, but Iran's gov't could move on to other things. With China it's even worse, as it seems there is custom software being used from within China to actively discover and censor out new Tor bridges (as in, a new one is used by someone, some minutes later another connection from China comes in to it, speaks Tor protocol, disconnects, and then the bridge is blocked.) [3] This is just to make sure the information about these matters is out there. If anybody is interested in helping out Tor, the mailing lists [4] and research papers and code is out there. :) [5] [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-internet-censorship-iran https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-internet-censorship-... [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-partially-blocks-encrypted-network-traffic https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-partially-blocks-encry... (more results via a simple search if interested.) [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/knock-knock-knockin-bridges-doors https://blog.torproject.org/blog/knock-knock-knockin-bridges... [4] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo [5] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer

107 points by gbrindisi 13y ago

b6 13y ago

This guy is doing good work, and I fear for his safety.

DividesByZero 13y ago
Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense? Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.
- wnight 13y ago
  Unless a business in that position attempts to enforce its position, what's the problem? If he is making something easier for others he should be rewarded or he'll stop. It's like saying a road has no value because stuff isn't created on the road, just moved. As for ethics, you could sleep better after buying a kilo of coke on silk road than paying your taxes.
  - DividesByZero 13y ago
    Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.
    - wyager 13y ago
      >Roads are a public good, not a business It's funny how I keep getting charged to drive on certain roads that provide a better service than certain other roads.
      - DividesByZero 13y ago
        The owners of such roads are operating rent-seeking businesses. Not in any way a contradiction.
    - jacoblyles 13y ago
      There were lots of private highways and roads in early US history[1]. I'm not saying it's always and everywhere a good idea, but the historical reality or private roads suggests we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_...
    - wnight 13y ago
      I think you're arguing with the mirror. I said it's like [the fallacy of] thinking a road has no value ... And I see a lot of businesses selling stuff like 3d printers who use open designs and contribute changes back to the community. Lock-in is a choice people make.
- aero142 13y ago
  Morals of being a drug market aside, in what way is SilkRoad a "rent-seeking enterprise" any more than any other transaction facilitating entity? Every transaction has friction and facilitators provide the service of matching buyers and sellers. Maybe not the highest ideal of productivity but hardly deserves to be described as rent-seeking.
  - DividesByZero 13y ago
    You're correct, every business that profits from easing transactional friction is to a greater or lesser extent, rent seeking.
    - omni 13y ago
      Do you have any points to offer other than useless snark? You have multiple comments challenging your initial claim that Silk Road is rent-seeking and you have yet to offer any sort of defense of your position.
    - revelation 13y ago
      Who is creating the majority of friction in the drug trade? Nation states and their war on drugs. Silk Road is using technological advancement to remove as much friction from the process as possible, but it's obviously still non-zero, just like any market in the world.
    - aero142 13y ago
      Well, I guess we just disagree on the definition of rent-seeking. Matching willing buyers and sellers creates value by increasing the satisfaction of both the buyer and the seller since both should be better off after the transaction. The facilitator who creates more mutually beneficial trades is increasing the wellbeing of society as a whole. From wikipedia "Rent-seeking behavior is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking behavior, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." SilkRoad is not rent seeking because they are not looking to change or increase the transaction friction and regulatory control of the drug trade for their own benefit. That is why rent-seeking is usually used to describe entities trying to create a government policy which benefits them but hinders mutual exchange of others. To define rent-seeking is such a loose way as to cover all facilitators who don't produce anything directly is to distort it's original meaning and make the word useless to describe true rent-seeking.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  Sorry, but you you've got the concept of "rent seeking" completely wrong. "In public choice theory, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking A black market - almost by definition - is one in which the players are cut off from the channels of official lobbying or patronage that make rent-seeking a viable economic strategy. That's not to say that a dark symbiosis can't develop between black marketeers and legitimate authorities. For instance, the police, by enforcing laws against drug trafficking, increase the risks of trafficking. This increases prices and profits alike. High profits attract a constant supply of traffickers, who also tend to be far more ruthless than the average businessman, which brings additional layers of criminality to the trade, thereby ensuring continued employment for the police - to say nothing of an unsettling expansion of their powers. But at no point do the traffickers and the police feel a mutual need to formalize this relationship, since public opinion remains, on balance, opposed to the narcotics trade. That is to say, the police can rely on the ballot box to stay employed, stripping them of any incentive to do business (at least on an open, institutional level) with traffickers. Meanwhile, the traffickers can count on public opinion to keep police on the beat, and need not go to any further expense to keep their racket going. Contrast all this with the retroactive extension of copyright terms which has got to be the canonical example of true rent seeking, illuminating the practice in its most naked and unproductive form. EDIT: An more germane example is the lobbying done by pharmaceutical companies with an interest in keeping the law and public opinion in opposition to illegal substances that may have pharmacological properties. Because these substances are too well known to be patented, their legalization could lead to patent-free formulations that reduce demand for patentable substitutes that pharmaceutical companies have created, or ones they could develop in future. Blocking the legal use of one widely and cheaply available substance to create a market for a more expensive but conceivably inferior alternate is a text-book case of rent seeking.
  - DividesByZero 13y ago
    I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour! You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.
- b6 13y ago
  Well, through SR, DPR helps all parties involved be safer. For buyers, all products have ratings and reviews, and sellers have overall satisfaction statistics, and there is a forum. For sellers, there are buyer statistics. He's a pioneer. When SR has strange technical problems, he can't just jump on IRC or Stack Overflow and ask. He has to deal with attacks against Tor no one else has experienced. I don't know of anyone else betting more heavily on the security of Tor (at least the hidden service aspect). He's also just plain inspiring. He had a bold idea, coded it up, kept it working, by himself or with a small group, despite opposition by the worst possible adversaries. He puts his life on the line for his principles. If the world had more brave and highly capable people like him, we might not still be in the drug war.

mdelias 13y ago

Submitted this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645665

lenazegher 13y ago

Given the ultimate traceability of bitcoins, would anyone care to speculate how tDPR converts SR's transaction fees into fiat currency without being tracked down by law enforcement?

adventured 13y ago
He is law enforcement. His interest is the vendors and mapping the network.
- youngerdryas 13y ago
  "How can you plug yourself into the tax eating, life sucking, violent, sadistic, war mongering, oppressive machine ever again? How can you kneel when you’ve felt the power of your own legs? Felt them stretch and flex as you learn to walk and think as a free person? I would rather live my life in rags now than in golden chains. And now we can have both! Now it is profitable to throw off one’s chains, with amazing crypto technology reducing the risk of doing so dramatically. How many niches have yet to be filled in the world of anonymous online markets? The opportunity to prosper and take part in a revolution of epic proportions is at our fingertips! I have no one to share my thoughts with in physical space. Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening. I hope my words can be an inspiration just as I am given so much by everyone here." Definitely a cop.
  - adventured 13y ago
    He's definitely not a cop in the sense of a Hollywood movie (eg Miami Vice). He and his team are specialists. They are to cops what the Navy Seals or Rangers are to an Army E1. The primary goal is information. They could care less about busting any given small time vendor. They want a mapping of the network of trade, origination, distribution, communication, transactions and financing. Particularly to draw currently unknown or difficult to track network nodes out into the open. It's the same thing that has been done with paedophilia online. It's a honey trap. There isn't much value in busting single nodes. They want to see how much of the network they can map out, and the leads it provides to larger players. If this concept didn't exist, they'd desperately want to create it. Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.

artas_bartas 13y ago

I was so excited to discover that something like this exist - a community that gets on with its business without any stupid organization or agency putting sticks in its wheels. I just wish this spirit of freedom would come over to countries of the former USSR where it is badly needed.

jacoblyles 13y ago
I wish it would come to the USA.

mike-cardwell 13y ago

"Do you want to see this thing go all the way and take the absolute piss out of the power mongers of this world" Would anybody other than a Brit say that sentence? [edit] Although I notice a lot of American English spelling in there too.

skore 13y ago
> Would anybody other than a Brit say that sentence? You mean like somebody who tried to deliberately obscure his identity by using fake clues?
patrickk 13y ago
Brits, Irish and Aussies too I believe. When I read that comment, I thought that Dread Pirate Roberts could be using Libertarian musings (which I've never heard outside of US political discussions) and references to US law enforcement agencies as a smokescreen for his identity. Interestingly, and coincidentally, there's been speculation that the Bitcoin creator (Satoshi Nakamoto) could be an Irish computer science student called Michael Clear, due to British spelling in his (if it is his) written work: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
- claudius 13y ago
  ‘British’ English is the standard English taught in Europe and the Middle East, likely in India as well, so I doubt that this is a remotely helpful clue.
  - rjknight 13y ago
    "take the absolute piss" is colloquial British English though. I doubt that anyone is actually taught to speak that way.
    - claudius 13y ago
      Correct, I was mostly responding to ‘due to British spelling’ in connection with Nakamoto. The claim that some American spelling crops up in his writing (on the linked-to Wiki site) actually supports the idea that he is neither a native Briton nor American, but learnt British spelling in school and American spelling on the net.

xSwag 13y ago

Why does frobes insist on adding page numbers? For page views? It's terrible reading experience having to click every few paragraphs.

eksith 13y ago
Here you go : http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collected-quotations-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts-founder-of-the-drug-site-silk-road-and-radical-libertarian/print/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect... It's beyond obnoxious sometimes when some sites (not Forbes specifically) put just 1-3 paragraphs per page with one image so that each one is effectively a slide surrounded by ads. When I reach my limit of the "paged experience", I search for the printer friendly page. Edit: Er... Looks like Forbes is redirecting to the full "paged experience" upon clicking. Oh well. Just scroll to the bottom and click "print".
- deno 13y ago
  They redirect based on Referer header. http://pastebin.com/WNmLmKqL http://pastebin.com/WNmLmKqL
gbrindisi 13y ago
I've submitted the print version but Forbes is redirecting it to the default view.
JVIDEL 13y ago
I use iReader, it automatically converts anything to a one-page article of pure text.

nwh 13y ago

I'm curious how long it will be until this person is turned into an FBI informant (think Lulzsec and Sabu). The website has done some obscenely stupid things in the past, like leaving their real (non-Tor) IP address on error pages. Presumably the website is a large target, even just for it's common mention in media.

Strom 13y ago
The beauty of Silk Road design is that the site being a FBI honeypot has been built into the threat model from the start. All identifying info sent between buyers/sellers is encrypted using PGP, Silk Road doesn't see anything.
- new299 13y ago
  I thought the PGP encryption was optional?
- nullymcnull 13y ago
  That's not accurate. People are encouraged to use PGP for addresses and other sensitive communication there, but it is not enforced or directly supported by the system. There are still vendors who can't be bothered to figure PGP out (often relying upon dubious alternatives like privnote), and there will always be customers who don't care one way or the other. Silk Road itself doesn't even have a discrete place for users to enter their public key; it is only by convention that most vendors put it at the end of their profile text.

locofacetwice 13y ago

>Here’s the rub: the drug war is an acute symptom of a deeper problem, and that problem is the state. If they “legalize, regulate and tax” it, it’s just one more part of society under their thumb, another productive sector that they can leech off of. But he is doing exactly that, isn't he?

gambiting 13y ago

I agree with some things he says,and some things he says are absolutely stupid. Private police force that you need to pay directly for protection? Reminds me of ancient Rome times, when if your house was on fire, the fire brigade would come and haggle with you first,trying to negotiate how much you are willing to pay to save your house. Having to pay somebody directly(rather than in your taxes) for protection is unfathomably stupid. Right now you can call the police literally anywhere you are in the world, and they will come and help, because that's what they do. With his solution, you could drive to a nearby city and nobody would help you,because you haven't paid the security agency there.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
>and they will come and help the police are not obligated to help you in the US, this has been the subject of at least 2 supreme court cases.
- gambiting 13y ago
  If I didn't have a good opinion about the US system before, it's getting worse as we speak.
  - dmm 13y ago
    I don't think it's the responsibility of the police to protect you anywhere. By responsibility I mean, if you are not protected you can hold the police legally responsible.
  - derleth 13y ago
    Can you imagine how many police we'd need if there were an obligation to protect everyone at all times? There isn't a country on Earth with police forces that large.
    - gambiting 13y ago
      No, but at the very least I expect them to be legally bound to respond(in any way) to a 911 call, and not be able to just tell people to fuck off.

DividesByZero 13y ago

For someone who paints themselves as some sort of Randian superman, he sure uses the words of collective action and altruism a lot. "It’s paradoxical, but the less you focus on your own happiness and focus on others’, the happier you’ll be." John Galt indeed.

jacoblyles 13y ago
Outside of Ayn Rand novels, collective action is necessary for the livelihood of free peoples. Old-fashioned civic virtue used to fill the roles that the state usurped (see Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, The State"). I have a soft spot in my heart for Ayn Rand, but her moral system would be a poor foundation for a free people (which I am here using as a euphemism for market anarchy).
icebraining 13y ago
He's an anarcho-capitalist, not an objectivist. The two groups often disagree on many things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism

subsystem 13y ago

I get so tired of libertarian self-serving mumbo jumbo. He's a drug trafficker, makes large amount of money of it and I have a hard time seeing that any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade. Regardless if I agree with it or not, someone like Cody Wilson has a far better case in my book.

wyager 13y ago
> any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade. What "realities of the drug trade"? Any drug sales happening on TSR are by small-time manufacturers and dealers. There are no shootings or stabbings on TSR. The cartels don't have any reason to use TSR. I think the nature of TSR prevents most of the "realities" you're citing.
- subsystem 13y ago
  Last time I checked SR, if I remember correctly, there were substantial amounts of high-grade cocaine being sold from the south of the US.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    The only way to actually check is to take delivery of it. Which I assume you didn't do. There's lots of reasons to believe the Silk Road is real, but most of them are just assertions from mostly anonymous people.
- nullymcnull 13y ago
  Indeed. Pretty much all of the ugly 'realities' of the drug trade are those which exist and thrive precisely because drugs are outlawed. SR happens to protect its users from having to deal with most of those realities - and that's a great benefit. DPR rightly deserves praise for helping people to get the drugs of their choice without having to hit the often dangerous streets for them. Perhaps one day western societies will be able to have an adult conversation about drugs, but for the time being shrill reactionaries still set the tone. Meanwhile for every one dramatic walking-cliche of a drug casualty out there killing themselves and making the world shittier, there are at least a handful of responsible drug users conducting perfectly normal and successful lives. For any drug you can name.

cheeseprocedure 13y ago

Is there historical evidence to back the notion that, through market forces, employment standards would rise to meet workers' demands?

cmhamill 13y ago
Put plainly, no.
mr_spothawk 13y ago
Hong Kong is a good example. You can watch the first episode of Milton Friedman's PBS series "Free to Choose" for more details. *edit for clarity
- JVIDEL 13y ago
  HK grew off opium trafficking and money laundering, any other examples?
jacoblyles 13y ago
Growth in wages and better working conditions broadly followed the growth in labor productivity. I see labor protection laws as a lagging indicator of worker well-being that are only passed when a society is rich enough to afford them.

kybernetyk 13y ago

This man/woman is a hero of the free market and I wish him/her all the best.

wfn 13y ago

> Personally, I don’t think they [Bitcoin, Tor] can be effectively banned at this point. Iran and China, for example, are actively trying and failing. That is, unfortunately, not quite true in regards to Tor. Iran has on multiple occasions done/tried out doing (turned it on, then off) traffic censorship that directly or indirectly very much affected Tor. [1] [2] True, Tor managed to roll out obfsfroxy et al., which they'd been already actively developing prior to that, but if e.g. Iran (again) attempted country-wise generic SSL censorship, that would hurt things. Tor's pluggable transports would perhaps be a response to that still, but Iran's gov't could move on to other things. With China it's even worse, as it seems there is custom software being used from within China to actively discover and censor out new Tor bridges (as in, a new one is used by someone, some minutes later another connection from China comes in to it, speaks Tor protocol, disconnects, and then the bridge is blocked.) [3] This is just to make sure the information about these matters is out there. If anybody is interested in helping out Tor, the mailing lists [4] and research papers and code is out there. :) [5] [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-internet-censorship-iran https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-internet-censorship-... [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-partially-blocks-encrypted-network-traffic https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-partially-blocks-encry... (more results via a simple search if interested.) [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/knock-knock-knockin-bridges-doors https://blog.torproject.org/blog/knock-knock-knockin-bridges... [4] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo [5] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer