Some of you, I know, will have come from broken families. You look up to your father when you're young, but if he's a jerk or a deadbeat it's not really until you're older that you'll be able to understand that. Even if he's a jerk, when you're a kid your father is your hero.
I think it's going to be difficult for many of you to accept, in the same way, that Ulbricht was an asshole. He came up with the idea for our community, he built it for us, he enforced it for us, but then he ran his mouth to the authorities and drew too much heat down on us all and the entire system that he had built - that we had built - came crashing down.
Plenty of us had sunk a lot of effort into building our little stores and our client base there, as well as our reputations, etc. Gone, at least partially.
His efforts ended up getting a nontrivial amount of people arrested, some of them mere clerks and couriers. One can't imagine the families of these persons are thrilled with this, and people have been shived for less.
So I'm not writing this to take your hero down a notch, nor am I writing this to take you down a notch, but there's something that all of us need to be reminded of:
This is a private community.
We don't want to be the inspiration for the next big movie. We don't want casual references to the Darknet to appear in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. We don't want to do interviews with reporters from the Huffington Post. We don't want our little community documented on the front page of a newspaper. Deepdotweb is probably fine for our humble needs.
We are casual drug users. We are educated drug users.
We don't want children here, we don't want drug addicts here, we don't want crazy people here. We don't want to sell guns. We don't want to sell fentonyl.
I'm not trying to tell you what you are allowed and not allowed to sell on your favorite marketplace. Plenty of healthy debate is already being had on that very subject.
Don't bring new people in. Let them wander in. Usher the fools away, be polite but discouraging. Help them and teach them, perhaps, where they show promise.
This is not a revolution. We aren't changing the world for the better. Few of us are mobsters, visionaries or revolutionaries.
We aren't cool, hip, mysterious or interesting. We're boring people who order small amounts of drugs for traditional shamanic religious sacraments, or for quiet personal reasons.
Remember -
This is a harm reduction community We don't want to deal with children Drugs are illegal, we're not advocating drugs we're a small private community of educated users
Please be careful, friends, as I've watched cooler communities than this get ruined when too many idiots are let in. Most of all, we don't want to make the news because that will invite everyone's attention on us.
All that stuff has already happened, darknet markets are already well known to everyone that you would want to hide them from (global law enforcement). Now that you've shown up and struggled over the learning curve you are appalled at all these idiots who are right behind you and want to pull up the drawbridge behind you and lock everyone else out. As someone who's been in since SR1, the sekrit club mentality has never worked and only makes things more difficult. Get over it, we are going mainstream.