For those of you who haven’t heard of Silk Road, I’ll assume that you must be an outstanding girl/boy scout who lives a somewhat wholesome lifestyle in which only legal substances like chewing gum and cocoa are your indulgence. To sum it up; Silk Road is a (somewhat) underground website in which you can use an internet currency called Bitcoins to purchase many illegal things including heroin, methamphetamines, crack, LSD, ecstasy and marijuana, which get delivered to your door – literally in the mail.

Silk Road has become so successful that the man in charge, known as ‘Dead Pirate Roberts’, lives a life of anonymity that rivals the kind-of-Aussie-but-we-won’t-claim-him Julian Assange. And DPR is just as, if not more, sought after by the FBI, NSA and other acronyms who want to shut down his online bazaar of indulgence. The thing is that even though Roberts considers what he’s doing to be revolutionary action in the name of free individualism, he’s also generating massive amounts of real world currency from every transaction that takes place on the site (like eBay taking a cut of final sale amounts, but for LSD instead of BBC). In fact, he’s even caught the eye of rich-rag Forbes, where correspondent Andy Greenber engaged in 8 months of digital foreplay to coax Roberts into agreeing to an interview with him. Unsurprisingly, the result is a cracking good read.

“We are like a little seed in a big jungle that has just broken the surface of the forest floor. It’s a big scary jungle with lots of dangerous creatures, each honed by evolution to survive in the hostile environment known as human society. But the environment is rapidly changing, and the jungle has never seen a species quite like the Silk Road.”

Talking about the war on drugs, internet turf wars with competitors, the FBI’s inability to track Bitcoins and loads more over at their site. It makes you wonder, if drugs sales were indexed – how many dealers would make the Forbes list?

Mica Nantes