a great name. You are going to love it. It is perfect on so many levels. But, I’m not going to reveal it until this weekend, when our customer appreciation sale is in full swing.
And, in the spirit of customer appreciation and love, we’re going to play a little game. Sometime between noon Saturday and noon Sunday UTC I will announce my new name in this thread. The last person to post the top three items on their Silk Road wish list before I post my name will get those items express shipped to their front door for free!
The name he chose – Dread Pirate Roberts – was announced on 5 February 2012. ‘I’ll give it a couple of days to sink in before actually changing it on the sites, but there you have it,’ he wrote. Switched-on forum members recognised the reference to the movie The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 fantasy novel by William Goldman) almost immediately.
In that movie, the hero, Westley, was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, a pirate with a reputation of ruthlessness who would kill all on board a ship if they refused to hand over their gold. Westley went on to become the first mate and eventually the pirate let him in on a little secret: the Dread Pirate Roberts was not so much one person’s name as a job title, secretly passed on from man to man as each incumbent decided to retire. The fictional Roberts’ infamous reputation meant ships would immediately surrender their wealth rather than allow their crew to be captured and killed. When the captain had gathered enough riches to retire, he would offload all his crew other than his first mate at a port. Engaging a new team, the captain would refer to the first mate as ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ and once the crew were convinced, he would leave the ship and live out his days wanting for nothing.
It was perhaps the website owner’s single most ingenious moment. By giving himself this name, he set up the premise that Silk Road was to move from owner to owner. The sins of one may not be the sins of another. Any person who might later be unmasked as the site’s owner could have plausible deniability for crimes committed by a predecessor.
It immediately opened up questions. Was Silk Road’s ownership about to change hands? Had it already? If it had, when had this occurred? Many speculated it had happened during the downtime after the Gawker article. Others thought it would be happening soon. Naturally, the enigmatic owner left all of these questions hanging. But he set in train the basis of conspiracy theories for the next couple of years.
Both the Silk Road forums and Reddit’s Silk Road sub-Reddit held lengthy discussions debating whether there had been more than one owner of Silk Road and, if so, how many and in what timeframe. Many of the theories were plausible; some were fanciful.
Dread Pirate Roberts, affectionately known as DPR, became an active and visible member of Silk Road’s large community, where he was hailed as a hero by those who believed it was their right to buy drugs without the interference of law enforcement bodies. More than that, his vision seemed to come from a place of peace, compassion and a genuine desire to provide a safer, better way for otherwise law-abiding citizens to procure and use recreational drugs. ‘For the first time I saw the drug cartels and the dealers, and every person in the whole damn supply chain in a different light,’ he wrote.
He subscribed to the belief that, despite what mass media and representatives of government would have us believe, the vast majority of drug users – even chronic drug users – were happy, non-violent people who were perfectly capable of holding down regular jobs. They weren’t taking drugs because there was something lacking in their lives: they imbibed because they enjoyed them – and because most recreational drugs did not cause the loss of control often associated with alcohol, and were far less likely to kill users than a product like tobacco.
Cartel
And, in the spirit of customer appreciation and love, we’re going to play a little game. Sometime between noon Saturday and noon Sunday UTC I will announce my new name in this thread. The last person to post the top three items on their Silk Road wish list before I post my name will get those items express shipped to their front door for free!
The name he chose – Dread Pirate Roberts – was announced on 5 February 2012. ‘I’ll give it a couple of days to sink in before actually changing it on the sites, but there you have it,’ he wrote. Switched-on forum members recognised the reference to the movie The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 fantasy novel by William Goldman) almost immediately.
In that movie, the hero, Westley, was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, a pirate with a reputation of ruthlessness who would kill all on board a ship if they refused to hand over their gold. Westley went on to become the first mate and eventually the pirate let him in on a little secret: the Dread Pirate Roberts was not so much one person’s name as a job title, secretly passed on from man to man as each incumbent decided to retire. The fictional Roberts’ infamous reputation meant ships would immediately surrender their wealth rather than allow their crew to be captured and killed. When the captain had gathered enough riches to retire, he would offload all his crew other than his first mate at a port. Engaging a new team, the captain would refer to the first mate as ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ and once the crew were convinced, he would leave the ship and live out his days wanting for nothing.
It was perhaps the website owner’s single most ingenious moment. By giving himself this name, he set up the premise that Silk Road was to move from owner to owner. The sins of one may not be the sins of another. Any person who might later be unmasked as the site’s owner could have plausible deniability for crimes committed by a predecessor.
It immediately opened up questions. Was Silk Road’s ownership about to change hands? Had it already? If it had, when had this occurred? Many speculated it had happened during the downtime after the Gawker article. Others thought it would be happening soon. Naturally, the enigmatic owner left all of these questions hanging. But he set in train the basis of conspiracy theories for the next couple of years.
Both the Silk Road forums and Reddit’s Silk Road sub-Reddit held lengthy discussions debating whether there had been more than one owner of Silk Road and, if so, how many and in what timeframe. Many of the theories were plausible; some were fanciful.
Dread Pirate Roberts, affectionately known as DPR, became an active and visible member of Silk Road’s large community, where he was hailed as a hero by those who believed it was their right to buy drugs without the interference of law enforcement bodies. More than that, his vision seemed to come from a place of peace, compassion and a genuine desire to provide a safer, better way for otherwise law-abiding citizens to procure and use recreational drugs. ‘For the first time I saw the drug cartels and the dealers, and every person in the whole damn supply chain in a different light,’ he wrote.
He subscribed to the belief that, despite what mass media and representatives of government would have us believe, the vast majority of drug users – even chronic drug users – were happy, non-violent people who were perfectly capable of holding down regular jobs. They weren’t taking drugs because there was something lacking in their lives: they imbibed because they enjoyed them – and because most recreational drugs did not cause the loss of control often associated with alcohol, and were far less likely to kill users than a product like tobacco.
Cartel
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