Crypto Biz Magazine—July, 2014/Issue.02

THE LEGACY
OF THE DREAD
PIRATE ROBERTS
by DANIEL KRAWISZ
Page.40 July.2014
Crypto Biz Magazine
I vividly remember the first
time I saw the Silk Road
in mid-2012. Like a timid
fawn venturing out into an
unknown meadow, I fired
up the Tor Browser, en tered
some gobbledygook
into the address bar, and
took my first peek into
the darknet.
When I finally log ged in,
it was like witnessing a
miracle. The variety! The
selection! “Crack?” I said
to myself. “I can buy crack
here? I’ve never even
seen crack in real life!”
I was awe struck. For a
few hundred dollars I
could have reams of LSD
blotters. There were things,
like ketamine, that I, a libertarian
activist, had
never even heard of. I’m
not much of a drug addict,
but for a moment, I felt like
Hunter S. Thompson.
All at once, so many things
that I had always been told
were evil, forbidden, taboo even, to investigate or discuss
rationally were now available on the cheap, and at the
push of a button! The brilliant thing about the Silk Road
was that it operated just like a normal business. It
operated out in the open, in defiance of the entire
drug war, and invited anyone to participate. It staked
its reputation on quality and low prices. This is what
freedom feels like.
When I saw it, I im mediately knew the rules had changed.
It opened its doors like any ordinary business. It let people
interact without fear. We now know that it brought peace
to the illegal drug wholesale market and that it made
enormous profits doing so. It was, furthermore, infinitely
reproducible. Thus, even though it could not exist with
complete impunity, it could be recreat ed again and again.
This is, I suppose, why its
mysterious founder chose
the name Dread Pirate
Roberts for himself. As in
the film from which the
name was taken, imitators
would replace him—even
if he himself were caught
and humiliated. His name
is a statement of both
economics and of a defiance
that is unstoppable.
Each iteration of the Silk
Road would make the
industry more peaceful,
more secure, and more
ordinary. It was one act
of defiance, but nothing
could stop the imitation
that it would provoke.
The more accessible to
ordinary people that
illegal drugs become, and
the more that the drug
market can operate like
an ordinary business, the
less people will be able
to maintain a conceptual
separation between recreational
drugs and other
business. Once that conceptual separation has been
broken, the drug war will end because it will simply not
make sense to anyone anymore.
The biggest problem with the Silk Road, I thought
initially, was that of exchanging bitcoins for dollars.
That was a real inconvenience. But the more I
pondered it, the less of a problem it seemed. In fact,
it was not a problem. If the Silk Road was attracting
business, it meant that going through the Bitcoin
network was worth the inconvenience of doing it.
It meant that there was profit to be made helping
dealers spend their bitcoins—which could be done
by just doing more business in Bitcoin! Because the
drug market was using the Bitcoin network, it would
draw more opportunities within it, which in turn would