Part One: The introduction
I first became involved with the online drug scene when I was a young teenager, although at the time it was only a modest involvement. Some friends from highschool and I found that we could buy pure DXM powder off the internet. All of us were frequent users of cough medicine (as well as weed and sometimes mushrooms, but at this point in my life these were the only drugs I had used) but it had become increasingly difficult to buy it at the local stores, especially for minors. One day after looking up cough medicine online to see if we could buy it from internet pharmacies, we stumbled upon a site that sold pure DXM powder as well as research chemicals. This was one of the famous pre-operation webtryp websites, and they also sold a variety of research chemicals. Although at first we only ordered DXM, it didn't take very long before we ordered some of the psychedelic research chemicals as well. This was my introduction to buying drugs on the internet and took place about ten years ago.
I was a fairly frequent customer of the pre-webtryp websites, and my friends and I soon had several research chemicals under our belts. In fact, research chemicals became quite popular drugs for all of the highschool students in our area, largely thanks to us. This continued until the infamous operation webtryp in 2004, when all of the sites we ordered from were shut down by the DEA, and it became difficult for us to buy drugs on the internet again.
Although this was my introduction to the online drug scene, and I do consider myself one of the earliest people to be involved with it because of this, the lineage that can be considered part of the current online scene stretches back to the late 1990s. I only know one person still involved with the online drug scene who can claim to have had an earlier start than me, he was one of the founding members of a forum called The Hive and had known Strike on the internet prior to The Hive forming. I don't know much about The Hive as it was before my time, but I do know it was a major forum that consisted mostly of people who had an interest in the chemistry of illegal drug synthesis. I don't believe it was a source forum per-se, but certainly sourcing did take place on the forum I believe mostly of precursor chemicals and labware. Another group from before my time was the Research Chemical Mailing List, or RCML. I also do not know much about this, but I believe it was a mailing list that operated about the same time as the sites that were later busted in webtryp. I was not part of the social scene at this time and only a customer of some websites, as I said although I was one of the earliest people to be involved with the online designer drug scene I was not in the social scene in the early stages. So, two noteworthy groups came prior to my involvement, The Hive and the RCML, and they deserve the credit for being the very earliest pioneers.
After operation webtryp I can begin to separate myself from my friends, as I started sourcing on my own and even lost touch with a lot of the highschool friends who had originally done it with me. After Webtryp there was a decent period of time when I had trouble to find drugs online, but eventually I stumbled on a website in China that sold research chemicals, including some illegal ones. That was the first time I illegally imported drugs, I believe I was about 16 years old at the time. I still was not involved with the online drug culture at this point in time, I was merely a customer. However, at this point I started to actively look for sources of various drugs on Google.
During this era no security was used and we made payments however we could manage to, usually through older brothers/sisters with credit cards or cash in the mail or whatever we could get to work.
Part Two: The Era of Sourcing
Back in the day but after Webtryp, finding sources was hard work. At first it seemed nearly impossible, but that was just because all of the above ground sites got busted. It took a while but eventually I realized that there were still underground sites, a realization I came to after finding a Chinese supplier of research chemicals. Not long after this I made it my mission to find all of the drug selling sites that I could. At the time I didn't even think that it was possible to buy classical drugs on the internet, keep in mind that up to this point we are talking only designer research chemicals although some illegal ones as well. Anyway, using search engines and really digging deep into the internet with clever search terms and stuff, I eventually found another supplier of research chemicals. And then another! It might take days of searching to find a website willing to sell research chemicals, but it was possible with enough effort. A lot of the times they were not like the sites pre webtryp, they looked a lot more like legitimate labs and they often listed chemicals by their full chemical names and more often than not they were in Asian countries. Anyway, around this time I started surfing around legal drug forums and this was my introduction to what would become the new generation of the social online drug scene (with The Hive and RCML being the pioneer generation). Most of the people were teenagers about the same age as me, and all of us had a love for research chemicals. No talk of sourcing was allowed to happen on any of these forums, and it was a rule that was strictly enforced.
About this time I also became aware of a site called Undrug. Undrug was a site where you could find reviews on sellers of research chemicals if you already knew their contact information, sort of like the Safe or Scam of today. You entered a website address or an E-mail address, and you were then taken to a page listing reviews and allowed to post your own. Trading contact information on this site was forbidden, you were only allowed to post reviews on the vendors. Now at this time I only had three or so sources, and I left reviews on all of them. And I noticed that I recognized some of these names! These were the people I was talking with on the legal forums! It looked like they had been doing the same thing I had, digging through the internet trying to collect sources. This led to some of us networking further, we couldn't really exchange our information on Undrug but we already could contact each other on the legal forums. A lot of us trading instant message contact information with each other and started to talk off the drug forums. At this time it became common for people to trade sources, I had three sources and if somebody else had three different sources, well why not trade them one for one? Now we have six sources each! And then we would comment on the new sources Undrug page, and what is this! More people I see posting on the legal forums. Time to talk to them, rinse and repeat. I got a pretty impressive source list, at least at the time it seemed impressive to me. I could get all kinds of research chemicals from several different countries at this point.
At this point the security was the same, it didn't exist, payment was usually via WU.
Part Three: The Era of the Forum
One day one of my online contacts who I had met in the manner previous discussed said that he was making a forum and inviting all of our other friends to it. We talked to largely the same group of people at this time, via instant messages and via the legal forums, at least we had several shared contacts. Anyway, he eventually made a site called Sandoz Labs on a free forum hosting provider, and we invited all of our friends to it. On Sandoz Labs he allowed sourcing of research chemicals, and this was the first source forum I was on, at 17 years old now. Now if trading sources with each other led to us having large source lists, Sandoz Labs really took the cake because we all pooled all of our sources. Now everybody had a shit ton of sources. At this time the forum was quite a bit different in how it worked than later forums were. Probably nearly none of the members were actually selling things, we were mostly just teenagers who collected drug sources on the internet. Almost if not all of the vendors listed were totally external to us and didn't even know that we had such a forum. Some of them might not have even realized we were getting high off of the products they sent us, or maybe they just tried to look like legitimate research labs. The standard procedure at this time was to write one of the sources with an official looking E-mail pretending to be an official researcher who needed the chemicals provided for lab tests. Of course this was bullshit and we were all getting high off the chemicals, but I don't know if all of the labs knew what was up or not, a lot of them were obscure labs in China that also sold various other chemicals.
Anyway, around this time some of the underground US vendors started their operations, importing bulk from China for prices of about $2,000-$15,000 per kilogram depending on the drug, and selling single grams for $100 - $200+. Now we didn't need to import drugs because other people did it for us and got huge mark ups in the process. At this time security wasn't even on any of our minds, a lot of the vendors were just using regular old E-mail accounts even and the most secure were using "secure" email like Hushmail. At this time it was essentially all about research chemicals still. Also I should point out that Sandoz Labs was more than just a source forum, we also talked about random off topic things, talked about drugs in general, and were really just a community of people that happened to have a common interest in drugs. Almost all of us were in our teens or early twenties with only a few exceptions in their thirties. Also we were overwhelmingly from USA with a few from Canada and Australia and maybe two or so from Europe.
During this era security was also essentially non-existant save for a few people who used "secure" email providers that of course were actually not secure
Part Four: The Era of Internationalization , or The Era of The Illegals, or The Golden Era
Sandoz Labs had the luck of having a member who was from the Netherlands and who had access to the illegal drug scene there. He wanted to make his own forum, and happened to be a member on a Dutch speaking legal drug discussion forum and friends with many Dutch and European drug users. He set up a new forum called The Bible and invited all of his European friends to it and also all of the people on Sandoz Labs. SL continued to operate for a while, it had some problem and we lost the forum but it was brought back as SL II, but that was short lasted because The Bible took over as the number one spot. The Bible was a mix of about half Europeans, mostly Dutch, and half people from USA, Canada and Australia. The English speaking part of the scene was mostly involved in research chemicals at this time, but the Europeans were much better connected for illegal drugs and this was for a lot of us our first ability to buy illegal drugs such as LSD online. The Bible was a mix between the SL model, where almost all of the vendors were independent of us and we just shared their contact information, and the second model where the vendors were on the forum but got orders placed off of it. Several of the vendors on The Bible were actually members, but they would have an E-mail address listed that used a different name than their forum name, and only their trusted associates would be able to link the E-mail to the forum name. At this point our security moved from "what the fuck is security" to "mostly horribly bad security", hushmail was commonly used and some people used some proxy servers as well. This was my first introduction to Tor as that was a technology the admin of the forum used and told me about. I started using Tor and Hushmail around this time, I also had changed my pseudonym from the one I had used on the public forums and only let a very few trusted people know who I was. I think probably entirely any links to my original pseudonym have been cut 100% at this point, but it was so long ago that there is little chance anybody could use my old identity to find the IRL me even if they tried to, thanks to data retention not keeping IP address records for so long as well as my own general lack of giving out personally identifying information. The Bible itself was hosted in the basement of one of our members I believe, so was sort of a step up above free forum hosting with banner ads lol.
The Bible was great, super educated people, several were professional chemists with a lot of education. At this time, largely because of the introduction of the Europeans and their friends, our demographics changed a bit. Still pretty young, but a lot more common for people to be in their mid twenties and a lot more in their thirties as well. A lot of people who were pretty into computers and activism and philosophy as well. If before we were a bunch of teenagers getting high on research chemicals, now we were a bunch of teenagers and a bunch of highly educated young people getting high on a lot of drugs. We also started to get a lot of actually pretty big suppliers and had access to even crystal LSD at this time, all of the classical psychedelics. I think the Bible allowed the sale of everything although the Admin had for a while banned the sale of hard drugs like heroin I seem to recall they were still somewhat sourced. Primarily it was about the classical psychedelics and MDMA and Research Chemicals though, although I do think a lot of people who only had access to research chemicals prior were happier with classical psychedelics. I personally switched from DXM to Ketamine and became largely into LSD and slowly stopped using research chemicals (whereas before I had used research chemicals quite heavily).
We really had an excellent community and it was super tight knit. This could honestly be called the Golden Era of source forums because it was just epic, everybody was intelligent, we had access to all kinds of drugs in all kinds of amounts for pretty cheap, there was a really strong sense of community and love. Also, during this time arrests were literally unheard of (until toward the end when at least one member had an interception, but it is unlikely they ever suspected him of being involved with a ring), short of the webtryp people of course. We were not even a blip on law enforcements radar, this is quite evidenced by the fact that none of us got busted despite our quite shitty security (especially on Sandoz Labs where we had essentially no security). Interceptions just didn't happen, busts just didn't happen, everybody felt safe.
I was made a moderator on The Bible and it was my first experience helping to admin an illegal forum, while I was on the Bible I was 17-18 years old.
During this time we became security aware, some people started using Tor, most people were using proxies, most of the vendors took E-gold and cashed out with anonymous ATM cards, we had to vote on new members and get them approved by an admin (though on SL the admin approved everyone as well), all of the involved (ie: not Chinese) vendors were using Hushmail. SL wasn't so strict on not talking about the forum off the forum, and most members were approved with a simple request (I don't even think it had closed registration, you just needed to know the url if I recall correctly), on the other hand the Bible was super strict on not talking about it off it and getting only screened members. The number one rule of fight club was you don't talk about The Bible. I don't really think anyone cares if I talk about it now, most of these people are long gone or they have changed their pseudonyms so many times that nobody knows who the fuck they are, the forum has been down for years now and is never coming back, it is only right that the world knows about how Epic of a time we had lol.
Now some time into the existence of The Bible another Dutch dude setup his own forum called research-chemicals.net , and he had a new crowd of people with him. Also there was some opiate oriented forum as well, OPR online pharmacy review was the name I think I was never a member there though, and their members would soon come to curse the online drug scene with scammers and fuck ups. Also there were always some weed forums going back quite a while as well I was never a member on any weed oriented forums. In fact, you can see over time a merging of different communities that were once largely drug specific, the further back you go the more the communities centered around a single sort of drug, with forums that largely consisted of weed vendors, research chemicals (SL), illegal party drugs (Bible, tho it also had the RC sources we brought from SL, largely contact info), Opiates (OPR), and Steroids as well. Fast forward and the distinction between any of these groups becomes less and less as they merge into each other into the Polydrug Scene. The same thing can be seen with nationality, we had US centric forums, European centric forums, UK centric forums, but the more you fast forward the less the distinction sticks, so you go from having a bunch of more narrowly oriented drug forums from narrowly oriented countries towards having a single international polydrug scene. There is also a Russian Scene and a Swedish Scene at least, we have had limited contact with the Russians and the Swedish people historically (although had some from both those scenes on international forums) but the English speaking forums and Dutch/German Etc speaking forums largely merged together and used the shared language of English. Now on Silk Road it is probably even way more international than ever SR is certainly the melting pot of the drug forums even see some Middle Eastern people here (tho one dude on Bible had heroin source in the middle east).
Anyway sorry to go on a tangent there, but on the Bible we were all quite unfond of rc.net and although many of our members got accounts there we pretty much were loyal to Bible, in that we would talk about rc.net on Bible but never about Bible on rc.net. Anyway this lasted for quite a while, then enter Rikki. Rikki was some Russian guy who actually had a presence in the Russian scene (one of the only people from that scene to have a major presence on the English speaking source forums), and he became pretty popular on rc.net. Anyway he actually was a pretty clever guy, and he knew there was a forum like Bible because at the time a lot of us were making trip reports and they ended up on sites like Bluelight, and he noticed at the same time a lot of people would write a trip report about some new exotic research chemical or other rare drug that wasn't widely available. He deduced that we must be on some forum together, and actually made a pretty impressive list of our members based off of trip report analysis. When he went public with what he had done it really freaked out the admin of Bible, and in short time he got paranoid that Rikki was an interpol agent and pulled the plug on The Bible, the best source forum that ever was.
Oh yeah, coming back to here (I just remembered to add this) some of us on the Bible made a site called Undrugged which was essentially the new Undrug, since Undrug was over run with scammers and shills and spammers and rendered totally useless. Undrugged was the same concept as Undrug but with security features added, for one we had captcha to prevent spammers, you needed an invite code (which was fairly easy to get) to post reviews but not to read reviews, a single person couldn't make back to back reviews, and we had a report a post feature and an active moderation team of half a dozen members. Undrugged soon became extremely popular, and we soon had a source list of over a thousand different vendors and reviews on them (everybody else could only see reviews on vendors if they knew their contact info, we could see the entire database, and we called undrugged the Vendor Database , or the VDB). Damn, it was sure awesome to have gone from struggling to finding sources and having only 1, 2 or 3 to having over 1,000 !
Part Five: The Dull Days, the emergence of organized scammers
With the Bible down a lot of us went to rc.net because it was pretty much the only other forum around this time other than OPR and PR (pharmacy rater, a site owned by a sociopathic scammer who has run literally dozens of scams in the online scene. He might have used to have been legit, but he turned into a scammer early on, and actually organized a group of other people to scam the drug scene, they would try to get membership on the forums build up reputation and then scam with it, they also started running many of their own forums where they mixed legit vendors with their own scams and then eventually scammed everyone on bulk everything must go sales, took the forum down rinse and repeat. They were actually responsible for a lot of new people coming into the drug scene, because they always needed a fresh set of victims, so they would run a new forum, list contact info of legit vendors and recruit people off public forums and such to it, then after about 6 months they would scam everyone as hard as they could,take the forum down, cool off a few weeks, rinse and repeat with a new set of people. A LOT of new people coming into this scene at the time got their start on scammer run forums. They also lied to the end of the earth to new members and told them they were legit and the legit forums were full of scammers, infiltrated the legit forums as best they could and scammed on them, got peoples contact info and blackmailed them with it via the threat of doxing or LE, got these people to get them on forums or send them money, and generally were just a massive cancer on the scene).
Anyway we were on rc.net for a while but it wasn't very exciting. I started to really get into computer security at this point in time, although I was already introduced to it on The Bible. Toward the end of Bible some people actually started using GPG as well, I think Operation Raw Deal took place right at the end of Bible, which was a major operation against steroid forums that was made possible because Hushmail is completely full of shit and hands over decrypted E-mails to the US government by the bucketload. The fact that none of us got busted at this time was actually pretty indicative that none of our forums had yet been infiltrated, since all of were sending addresses via Hushmail. After Raw Deal GPG started to be used by more people but it wasn't popular yet maybe 10% of people started to use it but the others just switched to safe-mail lol.
Part Six: The UK makes an appearance, the rapidly name changing but still the same forum era
Anyway Rikki ended up making his own forum with AP called FTWR, follow the white rabbit. I got membership there and it was pretty nice not nearly as professional as the Bible but much better than rc.net. Anyway it was mostly the same crap here as before, the biggest addition was that a group of people from the UK joined and that was when I perceived the UK as becoming involved in the forum scene in a big way, in that we got a lot of people from the UK who were friends with each other (just like Bible brought a lot of European friends, Sandoz was a lot of mostly American friends, etc). At this point we had English speaking people from pretty much everywhere, with a big cluster from USA, a big cluster from UK and a big cluster from Europe (with English as a second third or fourth language), and minor representation from Canada and Australia as well. Really I cannot think of much that happened exciting on FTWR, or on the forum it turned into FTGB (follow the green biker, named after the hoffman acid sheets going around at the time). They never had a whole lot of activity or a huge member base, but we had sources and reviews and a community though it wasn't as active or tight knit as Bible had been.
Part Seven: The renaissance, The Population Explosion, The Rise of Security, The diplomats, The FBI
After the mostly uneventfulness of rc.net, FTWR and FTGB, one of the admins of FTGB (AP) made a new forum called su.pplier.info and this started the renaissance of the forum scene. FTGB was pretty dead, rc.net was pretty dead and when it wasn't down or dead it was full of mostly idiots imo. Su.pplier took pretty much all of the members of FTGB and it turned into a total ghost town. At this time there was also a big population burst, we got hundreds of new members. Su.pplier.info was a public forum via word of mouth at first, and this led to it getting quite a big memberbase for the time with several hundred members at its peak. After we had several hundred members we had a big prune though and removed the inactive accounts and the sketch balls and the people who had scammed, then closed membership and made it invite only with the need for multiple references and approval of an admin. I was actually made an Admin of su.pplier and it was the first forum I was an admin on, I was 19 at the time, but first I think I was actually the mod of the security sub forum. At this time I always used Tor without exception and I had started to use GPG as well. Eventually we forced everybody on su.pplier to learn to use GPG and we booted everybody who didn't have a GPG key at a certain point in time. su.pplier can be seen as the first largely secure forum, everybody had to use GPG and most people were using Tor or VPN's or proxies of some sort, the server itself I cannot remember where it was hosted as AP handled that but it was in some overseas country and paid for anonymously. Vendors would often take either an e-currency like Liberty Reserve or would use fake ID to pick up western union or would use identity theft and Greendot cards + reload packs, which was quite a popular way for US vendors to take payment for a while.
At this time we became aware of two other forum communities as well, and I don't know there history as they evolved independently of the forum line I came from (although they all started after Bible was already around), Open Sore and Lanel. Again, I don't think anyone gives a fuck if I name old forums any more, they are all long gone and nobody is going to be busted because the names of forums that died years ago are now known. These three communities were mostly friendly with each other and we shared some membership overlap, but for the most part we were three distinct groups. We actually set up Embassies on su.pplier for them, so members from one of those forums had their own special sub forum on su.pplier moderated by the admin of their forum. At this time we had a lot of sources and a new model arose, we still had independent source contact information listed but a lot of the people selling on the forums were actually members on the forum, often they used one name to vend and another to post under the same as on Bible but some were doing both under the same name. A big change was that several people started to carry out deals via the forum PM system whereas before it was almost all done with deals carried out through E-mail and only reviews listed on the forums.
During this time we really started to get into security and I started to research it more than ever, I knew at this time that we were about to start an arms race with the police and that the only way we could survive was to make sure we were secure enough to withstand the attacks that were certainly going to come on us in the future. At this time there were still hardly any busts at all short of the steroid people and web tryp, interceptions were quite rare and not many people were really that worried about the police, plus we had decent security at this point. Su.pplier marked the start of serious competition and cooperation between the US and EU LSD scenes. More than anything else su.pplier was an acid forum. At first there was somewhat of a price fixing thing going on and sheets were at like $600 each, but with competition between EU scene and US GDF scene, prices fell to $400 per sheet. During this time you could get a gram of LSD shipped to your door from two different continents if you were a member on our forum, price was like $12,000 for European and $24,000 for US. We had tons of acid during this time, and in fact it was sort of the era of LSD.
Enter DZF or drug zone forum. The thing is that even OpenSore and Lanel people knew the admins and even though they were new communities to me there was a certain level of trust and a certain level of people being able to vouch for these communities. DZF came out of nowhere, nobody knew any of the admins or the mods, it was sketchy from day one and I and AP both actually said they are probably the fucking feds. DZF discouraged security for its members, encouraged poor security, and eventually went as far as to block Tor claiming that only scammers use Tor. It wasn't a big surprise to learn that DZF was operated by the FBI, and many of the vendors on it got busted. This wasn't a major operation, it didn't have a name that we are aware of and it didn't make the news, but a lot of vendors who operated on DZF got busted. When they got out of jail later we learned the obvious truth that DZF had been run by the FBI the entire time and it marked the first operation against the online forum scene (other than steroid scene).
Another thing about su.pplier is that it marked the first time that fake ID's became widely available as we had some members who were also part of the carder scene. During this time fake ID's became quite commonly used by vendors and many customers as well, which was especially important as asshole scammers like Pharmacy Rater were doxing people left and right.
Part Eight: The Rise of the Onion forums
Although I had been involved with helping to run forums in the past, I had not yet run any forum of my own. This changed sometime toward the end of the life of su.pplier. I believe I actually had a spat with AP over something and was kicked out of my position as secondary admin, it has been so long I cannot remember what though. Me and AP still talk although quite rarely, maybe I will ask him to write something as well of the evolution of the scene from his perspective.
Anyway, enter my first forum and the first hidden service drug forum The Drugstor ! This was an epic forum on a Windows virtual private server that I set up via remote desktop on a server in Panama, unfortunately I didn't know much about server configuration at the time and the damn thing leaked its IP address when php sent confirmation emails around Tor. Yay! But it didn't matter since I did everything via Tor anyway. This forum didn't last long at all just like a month or two, and it was largely just a prototype for future hidden services, a sort of proof of concept is what it turned out to be.
My second Hidden service drug forum was I believe A Figment Of Your Imagination (AFOYI) which I ran with AP as well if memory serves. This one was on a Linux box and actually turned out quite well. During the onion forum era a huge amount of dealing was done via the PM system with E-mail only used by vendors who were not part of forums
My third hidden service drug forum was Binary Blue Stars, a joking reference to the old rumor that people distributed LSD to kids on blue star stickers. This forum was pretty epic and we had some huge acid dealers on it, we actually had our forum logo put on about a thousand sheets of acid that were distributed around the world so if you ever saw a sheet with two blue stars on it that was representing our community! Never did end up getting any pressies done. BBS actually had a council of trusted members who called the shots, I did the hosting but it was a community ran forum. During this time we also decided to make three total forums, BBS the highly trusted forum , I think AFOYI was actually the forum we allocated for mid level trusted people and then TLG (the looking glass) was for the least trusted people. Our goal was that we would get a lot of people on TLG and then if they proved to be legit we would promote them to AFOYI, and if they were still legit there for a long time they might make it to BBS if they had something to offer.
During this time I was really into security and had learned quite a lot about hosting on Linux and even *BSD, and I started learning about much more advanced security like how to isolate stuff with virtual machines and what ASLR is, and I was also learning a lot about cryptography as well as I planned to eventually make a leaderless decentralized distributed encrypted forum. I also started learning some programming at this time.
This era lasted for a good bit as well. During this time I really started to network with the people I trusted the most via OTR and instant messaging programs, and this soon came to actually largely replace our forum communications. We still had forums, but everybody was using OTR and instant message programs to talk to each other, and we sort of cliqued up into groups of twenty or so people who chatted on instant message programs, and the forum was just there for our cliques to communicate with each other. We had used instant messaging a bit before during su.pplier era and even as far back as prior to sandoz labs, but during this time it really started to replace the utility of the forums, a trend which has kept on going actually. During this time frame I made friends with a lot of really big dealers, some of the biggest psychedelic dealers in the USA and some of the people I knew in Europe and had met on Bible when we were teenagers had moved up the ranks of their scenes and were major distributors there as well.
Part Nine: Dude, we are so secure, let's make a totally public forum!
From the trusted members on BBS, especially between me and enelysion, we had a new idea. We are so fucking secure, why don't we just make a totally public forum? This was the idea that eventually grew into OVDB aka OS AKA The Open Vendor Database AKA Open Source. Well, the rest is kind of public history now. Eventually we took down BBS, AFOYI and TLG and I set to work on OVDB, which I put all of my security and server configuration knowledge over the past several years into setting up. It was a Tor hidden service on FreeBSD with two layers of isolation hiding the external IP address of the server from the web server. I also wrote up as many detailed security tutorials as I could for Polyfront (which was an extension of Free Tradecraft my previous security site, which was an extension of Blackopsecurity a security site I contributed a lot to but which was run by others). I wanted to make sure everybody knew how to be secure. Well, then it happened we launched OVDB about the same time SR launched. I remember actually reading about the idea for SR from the original SR admin on the bitcoin forum prior to him making the site, but the council on BBS essentially came to the idea of a public drug site at the same time as and independently of the original DPR. We also had a massive history and honestly were kind of miffed that some noob was trying to steal the glory (sorry DPR!). For me at the time it was largely about freedom at least, I never made a dime off OVDB but I know I helped some vendors get rich by running it. I always gave trust status to people based on their history in the forum scene, which didn't turn out to be that great of a way of going about things honestly since a lot of people turned into fucking snakes during this time period (really the scene as a whole is just getting more and more full of back stabbing greedy money oriented fucks in my opinion, it used to be about the community and about fighting for our rights and protecting our people, and that is why I have a ton of respect for DPR now because he is on the same page as I am even if he is making a grip of cash at the same time).
Anyway the rest is history, I ran OVDB for a good bit, but the media blew SR the fuck up, Ene got busted by homeland security, tarpaulin got strung out on heroin and scammed a bunch of people, it just wasn't worth it for me anymore. DPR had a business model and a reason to keep running his site, SR went from a thousand members to tens of thousands to a hundred thousand from all the media attention and OVDB only had a few thousand at its peak. I decided it is better for us to just get behind Silk Road, and at the same time I figured actually that our entire model is not optimal. We should not have drug forums we need a decentralized marketplace software that is NOT meant for use for illegal activity but is able to be used for ANY sort of market based site. The infrastructure should NOT be so closely tied to illegality, and also we can do a hell of a lot better than php forums and centralized servers. I still think the future is in a distributed decentralized encrypted secured market software, not in a site made for drug dealing. And there is a lot of work being put into this right now and tens of thousands of line of code into it, and I do hope that it is released soon, it has been a pipe dream since su.pplier but now people are working on this who have the required skill to make it a reality.
So I think right now we are in the era of SR, and I think we are already close to unstoppable, but I think there will be one more era in the future.....
Part Ten (The Future): The Era of Agorism
I was first introduced to Agorism when I was on supplier actually, my interest in security and responsibility as the lead of security led me to a cryptoanarchist group that was largely composed of Agorists. I really have become quite a radical libertarian since my introduction to Agorism, and consider myself 100% Agorist. Actually, I can say that a lot of the core people involved with the forums now are Agorists, I am Ene was DPR is , and a lot of us are actually. I cannot see a separation between the people running the drug scene and Agorism now, some time during su.pplier I see that the forums became politically aware to a large extent. When I first started in this shit, it was about getting high. Later on, it was about getting high and collecting sources. Later on it was for the community and getting high as well. Later on I did make a decent bit of cash but nothing that was worth the risk in retrospect, although I always made sure to take as little risk as possible and never shipped any drugs (people who took way more risk did become millionares in some cases, many of them also went to prison in the end. Getting greedy is insecure, get rich and get out). But for the last several years I have been involved in this shit, it isn't about me getting sources or about me getting high or about me making any money at all, it is 100% about telling the government to fuck off, stop enslaving us, we will not be defeated by you and we will fight and we will risk going to prison and dying in prison to stand up against your lies and fucking evilness.
I think the future will be a giant encrypted distributed market place that has no leader and uses many untrusted servers, and once it gets to that point good fucking luck you Fascist slave trading assholes, you should have stopped us when you had a chance but now we are invincible, you can take down a drug forum server and you can put a drug user in prison but you cannot stop the Agorist revolution.
