Two Forgotten Architects of Silk Road | Hacker News Reader

Two Forgotten Architects of Silk Road

motherboard.vice.com

78 pointsmsh21 comments

Variety Jones is one of those "fogotten architects", who alleges that a corrupt FBI officer is blackmailing him / feeding him inside information in order to gain access a password protected BitCoin wallet worth $70 million that the FBI agent stole from Ross Ulbricht: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/variety-jones-a-corrupt-fbi...

Forum post with a lot more info: http://www.myplanetganja.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11022&star...

(Variety Jones == Plural of Mongoose)

Care to summarise any of the interesting parts, or is it worth holding on and checking this at home? I'm at work and I suspect clicking on "myplanetganja.com" will not go down well with our infra team. Also what does "Variety Jones == Plural of Mongoose" mean?

This url leads to forum posts that is written by guy named "Plural of Mongoose". I skimmed it over and it reads like memoirs of main (bad?) character from Noir book. Definitely worth a read if you're into that.

Agree, I just checked it out there's a lot going on. Sort of reminds me of McAfee's ramblings

simon aka Varity Jones aka Plural of Mongoose writes a very long, well written tale with many dubious elements about his life after Silk Road collapses. It supposedly involves high level corruption, $75M of stolen Bitcoin that needs a password, and a beach holiday. It's worth reading, he definitely has a nice style regardless of how much truth there is in the story.

Great example of panopticon-like surveillance leading to people self-censoring since they are afraid of being monitored.

I highly recommend reading the forum post linked above. Engagingly written, and with some exciting plot twists for people who have been following Darknet Market drama; and perhaps it's even true.

This seems much worse than mere "doxxing".

It's not just the "connect a bunch of disparate dots in someone's public online presence" sense of that term. They're basically admitting to hacking into people's private email accounts, frequent flier accounts, and the like. It's beyond illegal and doesn't seem ethical as journalism.

I wonder why the reporter ("Joseph Cox") decided to publish the (presumed) truenames of these hackers. That decision seems to undermine the political statement "he" makes when he refers to "the failed War on Drugs" — "he" has done the investigative work that the DEA and FBI needed done in order to deter hackers who might consider working on future sites like SR.

(Is there a difference between doxing and journalism?)

Or perhaps it's misdirection?

It does seem quite nasty, and at odds with what I'd consider journalism. Regardless of whether or not the DEA and FBI knew.

The people who wrote and compiled information for this article are engaged in speculative vigilantism and snitching. Maybe this info is already known to the feds, or maybe not, and maybe it is factual, or maybe not. Regardless, releasing it does nothing but harm people who don't deserve to be harmed. Stop snitching!

That is my initial reaction, as well. (well, not the "stop snitching" part).

They have basically hacked into these persons private accounts repeatedly.

It makes sense that Ulbricht had more experienced ccoders supporting his efforts. I've always wondered how he built a multimillion dollar empire one StackOverlow question at a time.

This does feel a little like doxxing/vigilantism, which makes me generally uneasy.

> A hard-working coder, Smed, or “Smedley” as he was otherwise known, had completely reworked key elements of the Silk Road infrastructure, and was being paid $2,500 a week for his services, more than any other employee.

Well that's depressing: he could have made more at a vanilla programming job in California. You know, one that would have zero chance of jail time. Did he fail to price his risk in, or did he just love this project that much?

Assuming $2500 is pre tax, yes.

Tax free...

You assume that this person is of legal age to work, a US resident, not a felon, has a decent enough resume to warrant a 6 figure salary, actually wants to live in California, and then conclude that he is an idiot.

That's an awful lot of assumptions.

Well, he had the added benefit of not living in California and hence not being taxed to death. Additionally there is the idea that working on something exciting and dangerous is much more intellectually enriching than pumping out some feature for a SaaS product at ABC Corp. Morality/risk is not for me to decide here.

Cost of living in Thailand is a tiny fraction of the costs in CA. 2500$ tax-free a week is more than plenty to both save money and live in perpetual vacation mode in, basically, what a lot of people consider paradise.

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