TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales From The Crypt #102: John Doe

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with John Doe, an ex-Silk Road vendor who had a four year forced hodl. Learn about what it was really like to use the Silk Road, the ethos of the website + forums, and the absurdness of The Drug War. Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. And if you don't, let me tell you about them. The Cash App is allowing you to stack sats. So you can buy and sell Bitcoin on the Cash App. You can send Bitcoin from the Cash App to a personal wallet, from a personal wallet to the Cash App. And then on top of that, you get the ability to use the Cash App

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Again, if you haven't downloaded it yet and you're in the U.S. and you're looking to buy Bitcoin, what the hell are you waiting for? Use the code STACKINGSATS. Download the Cash app from your local app store today. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty, here on a Monday afternoon in the Relegation studio with a very, very special guest. Also here with Matt O'Dell.

Matt, what's going on? What's up, freaks? We are pressed for time. We have a hard stop in like an hour and a half. We have a lot to get through. this is a very special episode a subject that matt and i are fascinated by but really don't have a good grasp or understanding because we were not participating in this particular market when it was popular we were sitting here uh with an ex-vendor from the silk road i'd like to

introduce you freaks to john doe john what is cracking well again thanks for reaching out to us being willing to tell the story we've been sitting here for 15 minutes getting like a pre-interview dump of your story and it's been fascinating yeah it's a pretty wild one for sure so so again we're pressed for time let's jump right into it uh we won like this show is tales from the crypt and i've heard up to this point almost 100 tales give or take from 90 to 100 people and a lot of it starts with uh getting in by hearing something about the silk road you were the first person who was actually on the silk road and got introduced to it that way so right let's let's jump into it how did you get mixed up with the silk road yeah so i mean it all originally started

um was at a party one night and you know someone came around was telling me about this thing called the silk road and bitcoin and how you can order essentially anything you want online and uh i was just kind of blown away by it and i didn't think it was possible so um You know, I kind of fell down this rabbit hole of reading about it and finding out Bitcoin and Tor and encryption and all this stuff. And so from there, I went and, you know, bought my first first Bitcoin and started testing. I went on Silk Road and ordered some ecstasy from from Europe. and I still was pretty skeptical at this point I was like oh you know $500 I think it was actually $600 at the time how much I bought and I was like you know uh it's probably not going to show up

and sure like lo and behold two weeks later shows up just unmarked envelope and I was just blown away, blown away, completely floored. Uh, and I, I just like sat back in literally awe and it was like, how is this possible? And then I just, it started going deeper. I started reading about Bitcoin and then, um, and, uh, you know, I, I got this idea that, uh, I should start selling on there because I was uh you know big into the weed scene at the time and there wasn't a lot of people on Silk Road at that point that were were selling you know weed and um so I became a vendor on there and I was like you know when I first became a vendor I was like you know there's probably gonna be no traction no one's gonna want this stuff no one's gonna buy from me and like as I

made a vendor account and probably within two hours later someone had bought from me and it was that in itself was crazy it was just the craziest craziest thing so walk us through what it's like being a vendor what what do you do what does the marketplace look like and how does somebody buy from you and how do you decide whether or not to engage with that person right so from from a buyer's perspective it's a lot like eBay like you have rating systems and, you know, there's pictures and product reviews and it's like there's a pretty good user experience

from a buyer's perspective. And then, you know, when someone does buy from you and you're the vendor on the opposite end, it's almost, it's exactly like fulfilling any, like, online order. It comes through on your end, like, whatever product they got and then it'll have, you know, their PGP message and you can decrypt that and from there you just ship it out it's really it's pretty seamless it's actually crazy when you think about it so well there was many revolutionary things about uh

silk road i mean it was what we were talking about earlier it lasted for two years and 10 or 11 months from february 2011 to october 2013 made a huge splash um but before before we die like i want to dive into like the silk road forums and all that stuff but let's continue with your personal saga and then we'll get back to like the essence of silk road right right so you started uh selling weed people yes yeah so so i saw this like uh gap in the market where there was people selling weed um actually what i got into was selling edibles because there wasn't there was people selling we don't ever wasn't many people selling edibles so um i could i was going and getting edibles and then reselling them on there for you know three or four times what i would purchase them

for. And now I was at the point where, okay, so I've sold these edibles and I've been paid in Bitcoin. What do I do with this Bitcoin? And so the only thing I could realistically think at the time, cause it was, there was no Bitcoin ATMs. I'm not even sure if, if Coinbase or anything like exchanges were around back then. I know Bitstamp was around, but my only logical thing was to go back to being a buyer and so I would buy other products on the Silk Road so I started buying you know ecstasy and cocaine and all these other things just as a way of liquidating my Bitcoin so it kind of became this like this this loop where i would turn these edibles into bitcoin and then i wouldn't know what to do

with the bitcoin and so would buy more product to in turn turn it into cash to buy more edibles to yeah it kind of fell on top of itself to get that circular yeah exactly and how long were you doing this for um i think it lasted for about i would say eight or nine months is is the length of time it was yeah and how uh how intense did it get for you personally um intense and like what in what sense like like did your like volume yeah the amount of business that you got it was absolutely insane it was absolutely insane like i from the moment i made the account the vendor account um i didn't expect anything and then uh a couple like i said a couple hours later someone had purchase something for me so like right there i was blown away and then it quickly picked up steam

it quickly was like every day there was two thousand dollars worth of stuff that needed to go out all over the place and um so yeah it got really crazy and it just it really blew my mind but and then i was thinking about it because i had many times where i was thinking about i'm like you know is this a bad thing that i'm doing and i was big and i'm still big into like harm reduction And that was why I really, like, support these, like, the Silk Road and all the variants of it is because it essentially is, like, a harm reduction thing. You know, it's saving people from going out on the streets and interacting with potentially, like, dangerous people or anything like that. But, yeah, as far as the scale of it, it got pretty crazy pretty quick. Well, and were you ever, like, nervous, like, this is getting too big?

um you know you said you just you constantly question yourself like uh am i doing something good which and i would um you're talking to somebody who is a big anti uh war on drugs right because i don't think i think it causes more harm than than good oh definitely at the end of the day but did you ever get to a point where you're like totally stressed out like this is getting too big maybe or did you like the uh no i like the thrill of it yeah yeah it wasn't even it was just no i i honestly i knew it was picking up steam and uh and no it was just fun it was just like it was it was it was like i don't know i don't know how to explain there was a rush to it it was like you had built i'd built something i'd built this like this this brand and people

trusted the brand and and and then also like making the money was was obviously great but seeing the reviews come back from people and hitting me with five stars and being happy and i was like wow that's that's crazy that's really crazy well let's jump into that like the drug trade today is uh on the streets at least it would seem to me as an outsider looking in like things like fentanyl are getting into the market and you're getting tainted drugs people are dying because of it right i think it came out recently that meck miller died because he was doing fentanyl or something laced with fentanyl right and that's what you're talking about like harm reduction right and so how did silk road enable this harm reduction in your mind okay so like

perfect example you're saying mac miller uh recently passed or passed away and supposedly whatever he was doing was contained fentanyl um so the biggest thing with these marketplaces is if uh if you buy something uh for example um some oxycodone pills or whatever it is that you want and the vendor ships it to you and the person on the other end goes to test it and it's not what they say it is they're going to get a bad review and they're quickly going to get either delisted or just just like go into oblivion so like it's up to it's the vendors uh responsibilities to make sure that they're delivering exactly what they say it's going to be so that's why i'm a big proponent of it just because yeah like today you have people just dying from from crazy stuff

so yeah from tainted drugs right so there was there was a whole like reputation system right so um how exactly so was it the way you described it just there was there like also there was moderators that were deciding to delist things as well yeah so um because there was there's a whole bunch of different things people would um be a vendor for four or five months and be legitimate and then they would exit scam and all of a sudden just taking orders um and never ship it out or um yeah so there was there was people actively monitoring it and that's also part of the game too especially now with the way these marketplaces are it's just the exit scam is a part of the game and you have to understand that like uh a vendor that you might might be reliable

now doesn't necessarily mean they will be reliable in a week a month or whatever it is so that's just part of the game but yeah there at the time there were um lots of you know lots of moderators actively checking listings and checking vendors and making sure it was all it was all kosher yeah for all the flack that silk red has gotten in the media since it's uh since it got shut down and it's obviously paying is a huge boogeyman in the mainstream media in particular it's enabling drug trade net but and all that but at the end of the day we were discussing this before we hit record too is that a lot of the people went to the silk road for the forums and sort of the free market vibe and and had really uh i don't want to say not optimistic but had pure intentions and

and good intentions at the end of the day right yeah no i actually think it's a big misunderstanding is that like a lot of people think of the silk road as just a marketplace and it was a marketplace but that was probably maybe 40 to 50 percent at most of what it was like a lot of the other huge part of it was the forums like there was thousands of people there that never ever interacted with the marketplace never bought anything they would just go on the forums to discuss ideas uh bitcoin economics like philosophy it was just this crazy community of people just coming together and sharing ideas it was really it was really like really cool you could spend your whole day getting lost just in all these ideas and um even even the uh site operator dread pirate roberts was a

huge proponent of the forums and he was not always there you know pushing talking about the newest update or security thing a lot of it was him he had this thing called the dread pirate Dread Pirate Roberts book club where he would talk about certain ideological books that he was reading at the time and have conversations about it. And so, yeah, there was this,

there still is this misunderstanding about the Silk Road and that it was just for drugs and it really wasn't. Let's jump more into Dread Pirate Roberts. How much of a focal point was he to the site? Was he a Satoshi-like figure where he built it

and sort of faded into the background and just peeped in whenever he could? or was he somebody that was sought after in the forums pretty heavily? It's hard to say because my understanding of it is that the Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't – it was one person who ran the site, but I think the account itself was passed through many people. So no one really knows –

Like, I know Ross Ulbricht is serving time for being Dred DPR, but realistically, I don't believe that he is DPR. Like, I think there was multiple people, the account was passed down. So it's hard to say, yeah, who is DPR. But he played a big role, yeah, a big role, and people looked up to him, I would say, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty shady to see what happened to Ross. what are horrible what are your so that's so ross is serving two life sentences now yeah and he never

acted as a vendor right no no no um so i wouldn't know if you did yeah so what are your thoughts on on ross his situation and sort of the end of silk road the the original uh vision at least i think that he was just a fall man honestly like they had to it was getting to the point where um they had to do something about these marketplaces or silk road was the one but like they it was being put in the news and it was the amazon of drugs and so they had to um pin someone for it essentially they can't let that go uh just just let everyone know that this this is out there and it's you know so i think he was a fall guy you know if he had some involvement in it i don't know um but i really do believe that like the the other dprs or there was multiple of them so

yeah and it and it's really shitty to see what happened to him he doesn't deserve any of that especially when when how i know about silk road and like harm reduction and the forums and everything about it and he's just looked at as this like kingpin of of of murder for hires which was all bullshit and yeah so let's jump into that that's uh one of the the main uh i believe they charged him with it but he was never found guilty of it right right yeah and he was sort of goaded and it was one of those situations where the fbi set him up and like sort of goaded him yeah i forget i forget all the details of it specifically but i know there was two corrupt agents actually involved and who are doing time now for it and they were uh giving out information to dpr or

someone involved with the website about their investigation into it so they were playing both sides of the fence so right there they were all they're all corrupt and um and uh we yeah so i mean it was all it was all corrupt and then um i think they dropped the charges yeah they wound up dropping the charges it wasn't even that they found him not guilty i don't even think they it never yeah they they charged him originally i think just to paint him bad in the press and they dropped the charges eventually That's 100% what it was. Yeah.

Because there was a lot of talk about the murder for hire, and it came out that they had staged it, and it wasn't really a thing. And that's what they were doing. That's why I think Ross was the fall guy. They were throwing enough mud up on the wall to paint Ross in this negative light and seeing if something sticks. No, and it's funny the dichotomy of how they're picturing him and how they caught him and what he was doing.

He felt so confident. and maybe he was naive, but he was in a coffee shop with his laptop just working. It was a library. It was a library? I thought it was a coffee shop. In San Francisco in a public library. I thought it was a coffee shop.

But either way, it was a public place. Apparently, yeah. Apparently, they devised a plan in a public place. I believe it was a coffee shop, and the agents or whatever faked a fight in another part of the restaurant. Ross stood up, and his laptop was open. They grabbed it before he closed it.

Come on. I mean, knowing that the two agents involved were corrupt to start with and that Ross, supposedly the mastermind behind all this thing, just had his computer open and everything right there and a notepad with all the details. They got him to sign in too because it's much harder. Like you can't, it's not encrypted. The laptop isn't encrypted while it's running.

So they needed him to like sign into the service and have his laptop connected to power and unlocked. so i think they there was some kind of uh they like set a trap for him online to begin with that he had to sign in they like there was some reason why he had to sign in something was going wrong he had to sign in and then they waited till he signed in to hit him yeah yeah either way he got and that's how they got the btce guy he was on vacation and they waited till he signed in and then they they drove an unmarked car through his gate so when he ran out in his robe to scream at whoever was drove it in they arrested him and went inside and the computer was unlocked yeah

yeah i didn't know that but yeah i feel bad feel bad for that guy he doesn't deserve any of that doesn't no do you think we'll ever get ross out i hope so i really hope so i did too i feel i mean he could end up getting out on one of these you know pardon all non-dry non-violent drug offenses yeah that's a crazy thing he's serving two licenses for a non-violent offense right so and that's the other thing like even though they shut down the silk road like many have have it's like a hydra like many drug markets have sprouted and it's and it's out of its ashes right like so have you been following the proliferation of yeah it's copycat not copycats but its predecessors yeah yeah i mean there's been i can't even count how many now i've developed

since the original one. I mean, it feels like every day there's a new one, but the whole marketplaces have changed. Silk Road, when it was around, was really reputable, and the ideals of it was really harm reduction. And then you've got places now that there's Sheep Marketplace and Dream Marketplace, and I can't even figure them all, but they'll be around for four or five months,

and you think they're following the ideals of the original Silk Road only to find out that they're just planning one massive exit scam. So it's changed a lot. How do these exit scams work typically? Well, I mean, essentially, you know, the site operators build up the trust of the community because there's a gap, you know, as one site goes down, there's a void to fill.

So now this new marketplace comes on and for six months, maybe a year, however long it is, they build up the trust of their users and vendors that they're there for the long haul, and then one day they'll just disable withdrawals and just disappear with everyone's money. Damn. Classic exit scam. Yeah.

Do you think there will be an altruistic Silk Road, original Silk Road-like service that pops up, or is there one that has turned out not to be an exit scam in your mind? No, I don't believe, no. I think it will keep playing out how it is. You know, it will be around for four or five months and it will eventually exit scam or get caught or whatever it is until there's like a decentralized way of doing it

and I don't know how that happens. I think this is like the new normal. Yeah, the new normal. I mean, you don't even need it to be decentralized. I haven't been following any of the new ones, but you could easily imagine like a non-custodial. Right. like multi-sig right right yeah we're like they only control one key the user controls the other

keys right escrow could be multi-sig and then the exit scam where they can't take that much money yeah and there might be i still the vendors the vendors can always exit scam right vendors can always exit scam and and there might be i haven't followed it recently maybe there is one with uh you know uh multi-sig escrow or however that's what i'm saying i'd be surprised if there weren't yeah there probably are but also it also is up to the vendor to be willing to accept that type of order like a lot of these vendors will require payment up front especially with with larger quantities of stuff so it's at the end of the day if if a buyer comes them and it wants to pay with monero or something and the vendor can you know no i don't want to take that so yeah yeah that's

the other thing like there's a big question is is bitcoin still the dominant cryptocurrency in these dark markets is something like monero oh yeah i mean a lot of them you'll you'll see some vendors say they accept monero and and litecoin and stuff but i mean i don't have any of the stats on on who who's buying what with that but yeah bitcoin is king for sure and so this this world sort of introduced you to the world of bitcoin how did the silk road help you come to understand and appreciate bitcoin yeah so it's kind of a crazy crazy that's another crazy part of my story too is when I was a vendor on there and was going through that whole route of selling edibles and getting Bitcoin for it and turning into other products to sell online I was arrested for an

unrelated drug possession charge and I served some time for that actually it was about four years that i did and uh during that time bitcoin had appreciated tremendously in value so it was like this uh what were you saying a forced forced huddle the fourth yeah the forced huddle forced huddle you weren't in a coma yeah just forced the huddle yeah i couldn't get a laptop in jail so uh actually really grateful for them because it's it's kind of a crazy thing i probably would have you know sold it at 60 or 70 dollars and because of them i didn't so yeah i'm pretty grateful it's a weird story one of the few cases that i guess people are grateful for going to jail what um like did you get out realize how much you appreciate and be like well i probably shouldn't

touch this now if i wait yeah that's it's an yeah so it's a really interesting so i went in that the idea is bitcoin is just used as a medium of exchange to buy these things and i came out how it is now i'm like whoa this thing is not it can be used to buy things but it's more so the store of value and that's when i when i got out that's when i started falling down this whole other rabbit hole of really figuring out what bitcoin is about and and you know the game three in economics and like i'm just grateful for bitcoin because it's like it's kind of weird to say but it's like saved my life it's i never graduated college or anything like that but it's taught me so much about economics and game theory and and history as a finance and all these

crazy things and yeah so when i when i came out and it was had appreciated in price that yeah it was it had changed my view on what it is and and all that were you following it all while you were in jail a little bit a little bit i got letters it wasn't mostly it was mostly just um like the price of it right now stuff like that i never um got like uh magazines or articles or any any news like that so when i came out i was just pretty much in shock i guess it would be similar to going in before going into jail and there was no cell phones and coming out on their cell phones it was pretty it was a pretty big culture shock and what did you do immediately when you saw the price of it when were you i almost shit myself what was it at when you got

out uh when i well when i went in i think it was around uh 20 maybe 25 dollars um when i first got out i think it made that first climb to uh 200 ish um and then i was like well okay so this this is more than just a something that you buy drugs with and then uh quickly thereafter it made the climb to a thousand off the Mount Gox, uh, Willy Botter, whatever it was. Um, and then crash. And then, you know, all through all these waves, just been holding and like learning more and it's just, it's been crazy. What's been your, your learning journey? What, uh,

what'd you hop into and sort of use to, uh, sort of harden your belief in the huddle mentality? Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of it was like YouTube with, with Andreas, like everyone says, um, from there, uh, A lot of podcasts, this podcast specifically, but I don't know, man. I just Twitter, following people and just everything. Now, more recently, like Saifedean's book, I just got Jimmy Song's new... Little Bitcoin book.

Yeah, I just got that one, so I'm going to start reading that. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just nonstop learning. It never ends. It could be, it's a full-time job, just keeping up with everything that's going on. yeah it's good for us yeah to try to help people keep up with what's going on yeah we know that would firsthand that's for sure so what uh damn man what's it like doing hard time was that uh you said you're happy today like are you genuinely happy that yeah no i'm i'm i'm uh really grateful that i did do the time and then it's kind of it's just kind of weird the time itself is pretty

lonely um before i went in i had a lot of like friends but they weren't really friends they were kind of just hanging around me because you know like uh i was partying and stuff like that when then when i went to jail i didn't get no one really wrote me letters um so it was a little lonely at first but that's i developed a really like uh this passion for learning because i had nothing to do in there besides read books so um when i was in school i never never went to class uh and i was just too mature this time i just never had developed that passion for learning and then in there i had developed i love i would read a book you know at least a book every two or three days so just just just loving it what uh what subjects in particular oh anything man i read

um business books about creating companies uh marketing books i really like seth godin i'm not sure if you guys are familiar with him he's a big marker um but anything anything i get my hands on they had a lot of fiction um and then and then i just continued that when i got out i just kept reading and then uh got got into you know the youtube stuff and all those all other types so it's been it's been crazy yeah fuck man it's fascinating this might be the most fascinating story we've had come through tftc yeah it's a very different story from from all the other podcasts i hear so um it's it's a it's a it's a cool story and then when i look back on it it's almost like a crazy to think that that i went through it that i that it happened it's almost

almost seems like not real so what is your life like now what are you doing looking forward yeah so right now my life is really mellow i just i just like to read work out and uh that's really it and i'm um don't have like your typical nine to five given you know the forced huddle and i'm lucky in the i'm lucky to be in the position that i'm in just traveling and just enjoying really enjoying life it's it's cool yeah well fuck man we're uh we're where's your travel staking you okay so yeah disclosing yeah no no no um in the east coast right now never been in the east coast so this is this is really cool to be here um and then uh gonna go back home for a little bit and then from there probably i don't know i really want to check out uh germany is

where i want to go next so we'll see it's gonna on a whim wherever wherever i end up damn dude yeah what so giving your story your connection with silk road and it seems like you have a very big passion for liberty and huge and harm reduction and also like what is your view on the state of the world and uh like the state apparatus and how it sort of uh imbues these cages on us if you will um i mean it's getting a lot worse i can tell you that like people's liberties are disappearing i didn't think the saddest thing to think about is like most people just don't care or aren't aware to what's what's really going on um you know specifically most recently with the stuff in hong kong and all that going on but yeah people are just not aware with um how much of

their liberties they give up with with technology and facebook and your phone and and it's nice to have these things but yeah it's kind of it's scary to see the way i think the way the world's heading are you optimistic or um i am optimistic i'm optimistic because of bitcoin yeah yeah yeah that's don't one reason i'm optimistic about it because i think that's bitcoin really has the ability to defund all these governments and things that are doing this and it's a completely grassroots movement and it's like the it's all aligned all the all ideals are aligned perfectly so i'm optimistic about because that's actually one thing i'm interested to hear your perspective on is you were involved with bitcoin on the silk road and very early days

so when you got out of jail and saw like the discourse around bitcoin like where the industry was in particular like how how had the conversation around bitcoin changed and were you happy with the direction it went in uh over the course of your sentence or are you talking about like the forks and stuff is that what you're saying or like what are you just anything like the way people were talking about bitcoin in 2011 that'd be drastically different than in 2015 2016 yeah yeah what definitely is definitely very different um i can only talk about from my perspective like i always thought of it as this thing to buy stuff with and then i you know i got out and it was my whole view on it's changed i think that's kind of the understanding people have of it now it's also

weird for me to even hear the word bitcoin when you know i was out at a bar the other night and i heard some people mention it because i come from a time when bitcoin was exclusively like drug like drugs essentially like or it was very closely connected to it whereas now it's really been it's a financial instrument now it's it's big time so hearing people talk about it still kind of weirds me out because i'm like i come from from a scene where it's not that i'm still getting used to used to people talking about it normally what did you think bitcoin was going to turn into when you were when you were a vendor did you just think it would be something ephemeral that would die out eventually and then move to something else or no actually um i remember uh

even before i became a buyer or a vendor on silk road i remember hearing about the silk road how This guy told me about the Silk Road and then I remember, you know, Bitcoin along with it. And I remember telling my buddy, I was like, yo, this thing is crazy. How can you buy stuff online and not be stopped? And right there I knew it was something big because it allowed you to do something that before you couldn't do. I remember telling my one buddy, I was like, you know, hey, sink a thousand bucks into this thing. If it doesn't become something, then you lost a thousand bucks. It's really not a big deal.

It was $7.60 at the time, and so he made off pretty well. He listened to you? Yeah, he did. Boss. So the weakest part of these markets is by far the actual mailing of the items, right? So at your peak there, that must have been pretty crazy. You were mailing a ton of stuff, right? Right.

Yeah, from a vendor perspective, yeah, any time you just, like, as long as you have your, you've done what you can as far as your digital persona online to safeguard that. But, yeah, there is, like, you've got to eventually interact with the physical world and mail the packages. And if you're a buyer, you have to receive a package, too. right yeah but as far as a buyer goes like i mean there's it's plausible deniability like anyone can mail something to someone and doesn't necessarily mean right you know you bought it yeah right there's no paper trail right right so there is plausible deniability from the buyer from the buyers and with that but um but yeah i mean yeah at the height um when you know delivering all these packages and dropping them off and stuff was a logistic

nightmare for sure and i think they made it more they made it way more difficult nowadays than it used to be yeah in terms of getting postage and sending something without a paper trail right yeah that was a hard thing that took me a couple months to figure out how to how to do that properly well again like talking about the evolution of these drug markets it was it the dream market that is doing like the the the um no it's a different russian market yeah some russian market yeah the drops the geo drops where they're just yeah dropping coordinates and being like here pick it up here right which is pretty it's a pretty genius way to get around it actually right right yeah i mean there's all sorts of ways people do and that's and i think

that's uh an interesting thing too is just because one of these marketplaces go down even if all the marketplaces go down it's not gonna stop right so that's what i you when you finally come to the conclusion that regardless if you think drugs are good or drugs are bad that's really not important it's just we've already opened pandora's box and we're not going back it's the same thing with bitcoin like you can't go back now it's already they can't go back like weed is called weed because it's a fucking weed it grows everywhere like you how who are you to stop somebody from ingesting like and it comes back to uh personal liberties and stuff like that like again like yeah drugs people are have done drugs for millennia they're gonna keep doing drugs

might as well make it safe right yeah and you have less mac millers and prince i think prince died because uh there was some fentanyl in his drugs as well yeah um but yeah it's what do you see the the tide of this conversation turning in america or around the world at all as far as as far as like drugs go yeah um i hope so i mean you have places like portugal so i think eventually like you know over time um you know yeah i i'm i'm optimistic about it i don't know if it will be in my lifetime but um but yeah i mean we've seen it you know growing up we got we legal or we uh getting decriminalized and legalized in a lot of states now um i think didn't didn't colorado recently do something with with mushrooms or something

like that so like it's people are slowly starting to come around to this idea maybe yeah i know ayahuasca is legal in oakland which caught me off guard okay i didn't know about that just the city of oakland just the city of oakland yeah interesting they had a one-up they had a one-up san francisco and get some tourism dollars um another thing i wanted to touch on was i guess back then like a lot of the narrative around bitcoin was that it was anonymous um a lot of people that thought it was anonymous back then have you know since realized that it's you know has a lot of privacy issues right uh what are your thoughts on that you know how important is it that you're able to use bitcoin privately that that that it can be used for these um

possibly illicit things you know depending on which government it is and how they decide what's illicit and what's not you know how important is the actual censorship resistant properties of bitcoin yeah so uh i was part of that group early on that thought it was anonymous um so and then now obviously you know it's not but i mean going forward um you know you got things like wasabi and samurai and all those things that are there will be tools and in due time it'll be it'll be fungible and everything like that i don't necessarily necessarily think like uh it needs to be like a narrow on the bass layer or anything like that but it's still super important oh it's very important one of the interesting things about silk road is that it was

also one of the first mixers i'm pretty sure right do you remember that process like when you deposited funds to the silk road they would i think they would they would mix them up for you yeah that would make sense actually this is the coin joint all-time high was in like 2012 or something like that it's part of the reason why they needed to be custodial too right i forget yeah i know they did have a mixer in there it kind of um running blank on it right now and then there was a couple other ones at the time too that were essentially websites yeah just yeah exactly i forget the name of them but um but even back then not a lot of people like use those i mean if you if you deposit in the silk road i think by default it would do a little like coin join

a little i'm not sure if you didn't think it was coin join i think it was just oh just a custodial tumblr yeah yeah so but i don't think like that was back then like most people thought it was anonymous i don't even think like right most people care but they weren't really thinking about it yeah well i wasn't thinking about it and now i'm like super aware of of what it is and But I'm optimistic, again, about where this technology is heading. Yeah, it seems to be heading in a good direction. It was actually what I wrote about in the bent this morning was just future, thinking of the future and the bigger picture of all this,

and specifically citing a piece that Nick Carter wrote. The name of it is escaping me. Bitcoin is a Peaceful Revolution? Yes, Bitcoin is a Peaceful Revolution. That was a great title. this uh it's a great article this other article that came out this morning from paradigma capital i believe i'm gonna butcher that uh but it was like uh bitcoin like a pax bitcoinia like similar to pax romana thinking 150 years into the future and it does feel like if bitcoin is successful it

it can uh basically enable us to to fight back against these state powers and eventually have the state sort of negotiate with us and be like hey uh a a sort of menu option of state services i could see that arising in the future i don't really have a particular question or anything i just wanted to go in there no no i i hear what you're talking about and i definitely think about that too it's like i think the world and a lot can change in 10 years and then if you think about if bitcoin really does what it set out to do which i i'm so bullish on i think it will 100 percent like the world is going to be drastically different than than what we have now we might you know have different borders or i don't know what it's going to look like it's almost i can't even

fathom what it will be you know because it's like thinking about thinking about what the world will be like with the internet you know in the 80s or the 70s it's like you can't you can't even fathom that well i can't even fathom like you're how much this is ingrained in your mind too because of your forced huddle like coming out and not having that that big of an inclination of how big bitcoin had gotten over the four years that you were in jail and coming out and be like holy shit like maybe that's what everybody needs is a four years forced huddle stop thinking about it and time lock it right yeah uh so what i guess what like i want to dive into like your mentality while like while you were were you thinking about your bitcoin a lot and were

you worried about it while you were in jail um uh no honestly i wasn't i wasn't thinking about it really at all um mostly because um i didn't know what the price was so yeah i just i honestly forgot about it um thank god you know i had a proper setup when i had made my vendor account cold storage and things like that um so when i did get out it was there but um no when i when i went in and while i was in there i wasn't thinking about it too much and then when i got out it just hit me like a ton of bricks how long after you got out did like the bitcoin price was it a couple days a couple hours uh was it something you checked right away or was it something that popped up in the headline you're like what the fuck um i don't remember i don't even think i

checked it right when i got out i think it was like a couple days later i just like oh yeah i got bitcoin and then i checked the price randomly maybe a week later and i was like oh my god so yeah i don't it's just it's just crazy just crazy start to finish this is again this is probably one of the craziest stories that we've had on tftc yeah um what time we got here but yeah i mean it's it's cool i'm really grateful it's funny anytime you hear i met a lot of people in jail who are very bitter about the situation that they were in and understandably so but for me it was like it was it was just like a really eye-opening experience like like i said learning just having finding my passion for learning and then the forced huddle

and just making the best of like the bad situation that it was so it was it was i mean in a weird way it was a good thing you were young right yeah it was young yeah yeah yeah fuck man yeah i think uh is there any like so that yeah you were cut off from technology and the rest of the world for for four years like what like is there any lessons you can learn from being disconnected that that you could sort of imbue to the freaks out there or yeah do you are you what what is the life of like refreshing twitter every five seconds like yeah i mean i'm guilty of it too having my phone out all the time but i noticed there's you know a couple months ago i broke my phone and i just realized it was a day before i got a new phone and i just realized how much time people spend

looking at screens and so i really make it like a or i try my best to be present in in right now when i'm talking to someone not to be also on my phone that's like a big thing i learned was in there is like you don't have technology all you got you're when you're having a conversation with someone in there in jail um you are only talking to them and now it's you know this generation is you're having a conversation with someone but you're also they might be on their phone having another conversation with two or three other people so it's uh and i'm guilty of it too but but yeah just being just being present and and and yeah engaged yeah that's that's one of the things i love about the this podcast is because we have conversations with so many people and

it's completely like socially unacceptable for them to be like checking their phone and stuff so you're like right you're put you're you're like put into this forest you know we just recorded uh an episode with with arbed out on twitter and it was like a three-hour epic episode no one looked at their phones the whole time right and that's like so that's so rare in today's society for you to have a three-hour conversation with someone um and have zero distractions and i've seen that spill over into my real life situations where i'm always you know trying to make eye contact all the time and eye contact ski and put your phone away put on silent and these conversations these were we're only 46 minutes in here but even 45 minutes of straight talking on one subject is not something

that many people do anymore again like you said everybody's checking twitter or their texts while they're talking and i mean that's the reason why we have this sort of open long form type structure on this podcast whatever you dive into subjects that i mean rogan basically paved the way and right just dive into something very very intently were there any other like major paradigm shifts that you noticed because i mean that was like a pretty i think that was like a pretty structural four years just in society in general was there anything that really stood out like the Syria debacle went down during then I mean like there were like smartphones weren't really that big when you went in right right you came out and now everyone has like a supercomputer in their

pocket yeah yeah I mean it it I'm sure there was and I've been out for more than a few years now So it's, I probably forget all of them, but yeah, definitely the cell phone thing. Like I said, everyone's on their, everyone's on their phones now. So Bitcoin itself, but just the way people, yeah, the way people interact with each other is different. And yeah, I mean, yeah. Do you have any, were there any Bitcoin friends in jail? I had brought it up to a couple people and a couple people had heard of it, but not

Not really. Not really. Yeah. So, and I was in a couple different facilities. But, yeah, some people had heard of it. But I don't know what extent they were involved with it, though. I feel like it would be, like, a pretty effective place to shill Bitcoin. Yeah.

Because, you know, everyone's got so much time on their hands. Very much like a nothing to lose kind of mentality. right it's it's it's interesting too because i'm in there um you know talking trying to educate myself and then i like conversation so trying to have a conversation with someone in there about bitcoin or whatever it is that you're doing um you got to kind of tread lightly because of the area you're in and the situation you're in the environment that when you go up to someone naturally they're apprehensive when you go up to them they think the worst there what do you what are you coming to me for so um it's a little difficult to have conversations with people in

there um and that's why i mostly just stuck to myself and read and stuff like that oh that's actually kind of interesting so i mean with bitcoin i think it's like really important to have an adversarial mindset um you know don't trust verify right do you think do you think that doing time kind of shaped that mindset for you in a lot of ways and then you know like that you were just inherently skeptical of other people yeah i mean silk road probably made you naturally think that way as well too yeah yeah yeah i mean i think it's a good thing to be uh skeptical and And, you know, you don't want to be a sheep, so you need to be able to hear someone's opinion but then also not believe it for truth or take it for truth

and create your own understanding of what they're saying. So, yeah. Yeah, dive in yourself. Yeah. That's one thing I've tried to be more cognizant of on Twitter in particular is not retweeting clickbait headlines. Because that's the other thing, actually, in this day and age that's crazy, especially with protests and events similar to protests where you get videos

and the rainforest burning down was another example. You get videos and pictures from a completely different situation and you don't even know if it's true or not. So just trying to dive into the news and the layers beyond it. Yeah. Yeah, we have an abundance of information right now. And because of that, you know, there's a lot of noise and you've got to sift through it on your own.

And I think that's why it's good to be skeptical. You've got to sift through that stuff. Yeah, Bitcoin really pushes that mindset to the fore and brings skepticism to other aspects in your life, right? Right. Inherently skeptical of the news these days across the board. Right. Well, yeah, I don't believe anything the news says, first off.

but twitter twitter has been been pretty amazing i just i mean the stuff you can learn on there from uh you know people in argentina or venezuela you can find people on the ground that are living that that life instead of reading it through uh the lens of a reporter who's putting their little twist on it you can so i like twitter for that you can really get get hands-on with source and actually works out great for us where we talk we talking about argentina last couple weeks i've had a few argentines hop into my dms like yo here's what's going down on the scene but then again i am that reporter sort of trying to uh right to uh reporter i can't believe i just called myself a reporter um but yeah i feel a great amount of responsibility trying to

convey that information accurately and it it does differ than than what a lot of people will say what's happening on the ground and what's actually happening yeah yeah primary sources yeah we have so much access to primary sources now right and you're a great example of one like yeah again silk road something that i've talked about a lot of people on this podcast have talked about a lot but a lot of people most i would argue most who uh have been on this podcast talking about silk road have have never actually interacted with it or right or been a part of it i mean i never used it right yeah so yeah silk road was before my time my bitcoin time well silk road was actually my original introduction to bitcoin um i just didn't think it could work and i was sketched out

by the mailing of things right i would refuse to receive like a package in the mail yeah that's understandable again the skepticism you're talking about you're like yeah how could this work and even if it does like putting myself at risk like yeah and i i like if you're a young person too there's there's a lot of access you can get you can get stuff if you need to get stuff and you're just paying cash and never have to um it's not that need for it in the first really hard to find pot in this city yeah right i think that's what was crazy too is it was um obviously you get you know the place the places i was shipping stuff to some of them um you know would make sense if you know certain if pot wasn't legalized there it would make sense

to be shipping to you know kansas or wherever it was going at the time but then there were places too that i was kind of blown away i'm like why am i sending this here because i know you guys have easy access to it and then it kind of struck me maybe this person is a 55 60 year old um father or grandpa or you don't know who's on the other end of that and so they just like the comfort of their own house and knowing that they can wait and it'll come and it's exactly what it says it's going to be and and that's and that's that so and there's many layers to the the safety like physical safety obviously but then like social i don't want to call it social safety but people who are uh apprehensive to to walk into a dispensary and quote unquote uh jeopardize

their social capital or whatever right um again state the safety of their own homes right get a package nobody knows anything is happening no i mean if it's completely legal i would much prefer to just have it delivered right you never have to talk to anyone you never have to just like everything else just like everything we order from amazon you get a cheaper price you get a better product yeah the only friction there is the it being the weight yeah yeah yeah so what about that did you have do you think most of your buyers were like end users that were consuming it themselves or do you think it was more of like a distribution to then like a local dealer who was selling yeah honestly don't know um you can kind of like i can kind of parse through

the information that i got from their orders which was you know basically just the quantity yeah quantity kind of yeah can tell me something um so i can make assumptions based off that but you never know like if someone is just a really they just love weed and they smoke a lot of weed or or if they like to party and do do cocaine or whatever they do you don't know but yeah i assume there was um a fair amount of people who were also um purchasing from me to to make money off it like that's how i like the way i found out about it the first time i ever found out about bitcoin was my buddy was going to school and he was at a different college than me and him and his roommate would buy on silk road and then they would sell to all the college like

their fellow college kids right yeah and i'm sure there's a lot of people that that did the same thing with with me but i never i mean i never i never spent too much time thinking about it i was just i was just so uh busy it's crazy to see how how quickly that market flourished too because i was truly free like was that like was it like a just a constant adrenaline rush yeah i mean waking up every day and and just seeing the rows of orders i was just like there's this is crazy this is absolutely crazy um so yeah it was it was wild and then i remember when eventually the silk road i was trying to just sign on to the site and it had they had that fbi seized uh landing page and i was like

what that was crazy in itself too to see i was like how how did that how did that happen how and it was kind of sad to see it was sad to see like the whole community go away and then shift to where it is now to this you know dynamic of there'll be a marketplace for five or six months and exit scamming and it's it's changed sort of fractured the right yeah the community that was on the forums yeah and there still is there still is also there are sites on tour that are exclusively forums they're not marketplaces so there still does exist that community but not I wouldn't say to the extent that it was. Or maybe it might even be bigger than it was,

but it felt like more of a community back then, I would say. Were you caught off guard when the FBI seized it? Yeah. It was unexpected. Very. Yeah. Yeah, I thought I went to the wrong side or something. I didn't get it.

And you found this out after your release? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that was a big story for a while. that's probably why i eventually dove down the rabbit hole in earnest was what the fuck is going on here did you you lost did you lose some bitcoin on it when they went down um yeah i think i i probably lost like probably 40 or 50 yeah craziness but i remember i remember probably

owns them now what i said tim draper probably owns them now yeah son of a bitch um no good guy but um i remember at the height when it was every week uh my escrow account would be about two or three hundred bitcoin a week i remember shit so but back then it was about it was i think 12 bucks so you know yeah but to think to think about that now it's like holy shit but back then it was a couple thousand bucks stuck yeah i mean i remember when i signed up i was like one of the first users to sign up for coinbase and i think they were giving out point one dollars yeah it was point one bitcoin but you know 10 million sats they were giving out with every new sign up yeah it's fucking insane when you think about it you go back to uh even before

that when gavin had that uh that faucet that was just getting people five like people could go and get five free bitcoin uh on bitcoin talk for sure it got gamed by by bots it got drained super quickly yeah says a lot about gavin that he had a game of wolf faucet but i think that's also how we'll look back five ten years from now and you know people are talking about you know how even one whole bitcoin is going to be crazy so there was people buying 0.01 bitcoin on cash app two years ago i mean we're yeah we're playing in a fantasy league uh with a bunch of other bitcoiners on twitter and the entry fee was a million sets so the prize pool is 12 million sets and i was thinking about that the other day i was like in a couple years we're gonna look back and be like

fuck i should have paid more attention to that league right me definitely i'm getting my dick pushed in right now marty auto drafted that draft i was at uh i was up i was at dinner that whole time i was like marty you just auto drafted away millions of dollars yeah and that's also it's also cool too i really like uh you know the the idea of time preference too i've become super aware of and i literally like you're talking about like how do i live i live a really like um kind of like reclusive life now where um you know i have the the choice to go buy uh brand new shoes and i still wear these shoes are probably four or five years old i just don't because i'd rather just buy some bitcoin i just that's it it just is like it's

good for you it's good for your health you know right yeah it's uh it's crazy i think that's that's one thing i i have like this is one of two pairs of shorts two pairs of pants few t-shirts just cycle through those and yeah you just realize the importance of i don't know just the importance of sacrificing like luxuries right now for for a potential uh future like your future self so you know it's it's cool to think about and i don't think many people at least like many people i know are still caught up in just partying and the newest shoes that have come out and the cloud chasers yeah exactly credit card debt right so cloud chasing is a thing it's uh it's crazy especially in fashion like the cloud chasing in fashion boggles my mind because it's

so expensive and it changes from season to season like well it's crazy i went to a store out here uh just yesterday and i saw it firsthand the the lengths people will go to get the newest thing and it's just around the corner from one of the supreme uh one of the supreme shops and like you'll walk by they'll have the lines caged in and people fighting fist fighting right for supreme jobs it's gotten insane craziness i do have some supreme some supreme wear as well but i got it on the online drop i would never wait in line with those heathens that's another thing when i got involved you know i just like bought my first bitcoin in 2013 i thought i was way late did you think you were late when you when you first found it

um yeah i think you always think you're late right no matter what everyone thinks they're late i think yeah and i don't that's what i've yeah you always think you're late and there's some guy who found it like a year after the first bitcoin was mine he came in he was late and now he thought he was late too probably yeah i mean i've seen that tweet where the guy he says bought at three should have held on because it's now eight and that's like and it's like i sold at five yeah damn it um yeah no i always think i'm late but now i'm just like now i don't really i just stay buying it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it really doesn't because you're just buying a piece of a finite amount and that's once you realize that once you really

grasp that that you're you own something and no one can ever have it and it's it's a set amount and then you're like it doesn't really matter what price you buy it digital real estate baby that's exactly what it's a land grab join join us you will eventually submit if whether you do or not right sorry for getting heady there um no this has been a fascinating conversation man thank you again for pinging us and showing up problem thanks for listening to the podcast yeah yeah keep it going because this oh when i'm flying i need to be need to have that content so yeah we'll we'll try to keep up man but no again dude your your story is fascinating thank you for sharing yeah appreciate it is there anything you want to uh any parting notes you want to give to the freaks

out there uh i mean just just stay learning you know i don't i don't know i just yeah just um keep stacking them stats and and that's it that is it that's it really i mean just keep stacking and learning along the way. And also, different from Bitcoin, but just kind of being, like I was saying, being present in the here and now. Really focus on, you know, when you're having conversations with people,

just being attentive and being right there with them instead of being all over the place and looking at your phone. It's kind of, yeah, that's what I'd have to say. I think that's great advice to end on. Matt, you got anything? Stay humble, stack sets. Peace and love, freaks.

Peek-a-boo! Thank you.