Accused Silk Road staff: where are they now?
Whilst headlines and fund-raising efforts have been concentrated on Ross Ulbricht, accused of being Silk Road mastermind Dread Pirate Roberts, three other men have been stuck in limbo awaiting their fate outside of the limelight. But the three have been spending that time very differently indeed. In December last year, three arrests were made concurrently in three different countries […]
A little piece of Silk Road history
‘This could be it. This could be the killer application for bitcoin’ – Free Talk Live host, March 2011 Whilst researching the early days of Silk Road for my book, I came across a wonderful little piece of history: a radio show by Free Talk Live which ran a comprehensive piece on Silk Road on […]
Silk Road: The Play
VICE is onto the documentary, yours truly is bringing a book out. But who would’ve guessed that the most notorious online black market in the world could be coming to a theatre near you? Emerging playwright Alex Oates plans to bring his one-man play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. Like many young writers, […]
Scales of Injustice – Silk Road’s SSBD
SSBD had no role to play in the Silk Road marketplace where drugs were bought and sold. He was a moderator of the Silk Road discussion forum, which had its own URL and was hosted on a different server to the marketplace. So why is the US so determined to extradite someone who may or may […]
Are you still out there…? Call me!
As my book deadline closes in really really fast, there are a few people I was having email correspondence with who used Tormail addresses and I’ve now lost contact. I really would like to hear from them again. And a few others to boot… The rub is, I don’t want to name the three I […]
Silk Road users wanted for research project
Silk Road may be gone and Silk Road v.2 yet to prove itself, but the site has become culturally significant enough to attract the attention of some serious academic researchers. And unlike the plethora of tabloid news pieces, their starting position is not always that the online black market is a den of evil inhabited […]
Remember, Remember… Silk Road redux
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 […]
This tinfoil hat fits me well
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 […]
About this $1.2 billion crap…
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 […]
And the winner is…
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 […]