It’s been just over a month since Silk Road got seized and Ross Ulbricht, allegedly the site’s founder Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested. A new Silk Road market has opened up, 24 hours after a false start which saw administration try to get things going at the poetic time of 4:20 pm GMT on 5th November . But is it truly the phoenix of Silk
Since the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, allegedly Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts, conspiracy theories have been coming thick and fast and they range from the plausible to the absurd. A lot of them involve his friend Rene Pinnell, for whom Ulbricht relocated to San Francisco – either that Pinnell is the real DPR and set Ulbricht up for the fall
I owe much of this post to the work of Nicolas Christin, the researcher who previously provided the analysis of Silk Road’s income. He is much cleverer than me or you. Give him a follow on @nc2y One of the most dramatic revelations to come out of the New York Criminal Complaint in relation to Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Dread
There are certainly winners from last week’s shutdown of Silk Road, the online black market where every illicit drug imaginable could be bought at the click of a button. But it’s not a win for the War on Drugs, nor for people affected by drug addiction, or for the Australian taxpayer. The people who will welcome the FBI’s seizure of
Hey, if the person who emailed me an encrypted message headed “Scoop” and said they wouldn’t be going back to that email addy could re-send it, I got a Decryption Failed (no public key) error. I need your public key. Use the safe-mail addy in my About page if you want. I have a new feature in The Age today.
If the Bitcointalk hackers are reading this, can you please let me know if I’m a lousy journo and missed the smoking gun, or if it was part of a deleted post? I originally wrote the below in response to a lengthy, well thought-out comment by a reader on a previous blog about the changing face of Dread Pirate Roberts.
Whilst many vendors and buyers have migrated to Silk Road’s two remaining competitors, Black Market Reloaded and Sheep Marketplace, other members have been working around the clock to develop and launch Silk Road 2.0. Ex-Atlantis mod, Heisenberg2.0, claims to have counted “at least 5 publicly stated projects with the said aim of becoming “Silk Road 2.0″ and many more gathering
According to FBI documents, Dread Pirate Roberts claims to have carried out one hit and was haggling on price for another. But was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? According to the FBI’s Criminal Complaint, Silk Road’s owner, the Dread Pirate Roberts, sought to engage a hitman to deal with a blackmailer who was threatening to expose names and
And so timezones screwed me over and I’ve just woken up to the news that the Dread Pirate Roberts has been arrested. I haven’t even had my second coffee yet, nor have I been able to digest what’s happened, but I’m pretty sure my blog is well on its way to most hits ever for a day. I’m getting quite
Some Silk Road drug dealers are promising to donate a percentage of this week’s sales to charity Black markets are supposed to be dangerous places. Drug dealers are bad guys. Drug users are selfish hedonists who would steal from their Grandma for a fix. Except when they’re not.
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