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./