It seems like everybody who used Silk Road talks about how great it was. Am I the only person who didn't like having to logon there? The smorgasbord of square drug pictures on it's first page has been copied by every marketplace ever since. But you couldn't have your drug pie without being kool-hwipped by a pirate bellowing his latest bullshit pronouncements from the poop deck.
Pirate Robert brought together the four cornerstones of "The Silk Road model" - Tor, bitcoin, escrow, and feedback - which are still used to this day.
But the hothouse atmosphere of the Silk Road franchise was the breeding ground of everything bad that can happen on a DNM. Exit Scammers. Corruption. Idiots being promoted to forum mods. Blackmailers. Cops infiltrating. Corrupt cops selling information. The now-compulsory captcha that you never get right the first time. Ddos'ing other Marketplaces while talking about "community". Pretending to get hacked and telling every vendor that he was one of the unlucky 57% of vendors whose money was stolen from a COMMUNAL escrow. Getting busted, then getting busted again.
Going to SilkRoad 2 was like being forced to go back to an office job you hated. The same grey wallpaper, the same old office politics. Both Silk Roads even had a SMELL. Like the handset of a coin-operated public telephone booth. I remember logging in to SR2 after the escrow hack. It was eerie, like swimming through the sunken wreck of a great cruise liner. I swam down to my locker, to find a note saying "IOU 2.1 btc", read a few damp messages, then swam to SS Agora.
There is a tribe in Africa who have sex with monkeys to bring us new viruses that have no cure. The Silk Road tribe. To this day, I have anxiety dreams about being a vendor on the first Silk Road. I made this video after falling asleep at my laptop in my clothes and having another one, like many nights in the past 3 years.
Now I feel like one of the first starlets to break free of the Hollywood studio system in the 50s, but I'm still traumatized by it. New vendors love being locked into those bullshit factories, but those square photos of drugs on the first page aren't as exciting now that our innocence is lost.
am sad now :(