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What a brilliant idea. Ross loved it. Ooooh, that’s good. That’s really good. The moniker “the<br />
Dread Pirate Roberts,” who was technically a pirate, also went along perfectly with Ross’s “captain”<br />
analogy, which he had used on the site’s forums before.<br />
VJ noted that, most important, changing his name to Dread Pirate Roberts would allow Ross to<br />
erase his old trail from the past, to maintain that he really had given up the Silk Road. It was the<br />
perfect alibi: saying he had retired and passed ownership, and the name of the site’s leader, along to<br />
someone else. “Start the legend now,” Variety Jones pressed.<br />
Variety Jones had no idea how seriously Ross would take his suggestion, though he assumed<br />
Ross would be enthusiastic. Ross had already told VJ that two people knew about his connection to<br />
the Silk Road after Jones had wondered who, if anyone, might know. “IRL,” VJ had asked back in<br />
December (Web slang for “in real life”), “is there anyone with a clue at all” that you—whoever you<br />
are—started the Silk Road? “Girlfriend, boyfriend, bunny you talk to, online buddys who you’ve<br />
known for years? Gramma, priest, rabbi, stripper?”<br />
“Unfortunately yes,” Ross had replied. “There are two [people], but they think I sold the site and<br />
got out.” Ross paused before going on to explain that he had told these two people a couple of months<br />
earlier that he had sold the site and given it away to someone else. “One [person] I’ll prob never<br />
speak to again, and the other I’ll drift away from.” He added: “Never making the mistake of telling<br />
someone again.”<br />
Now, as the Lunar New Year approached, it was the perfect time for Ross to reinvent who he<br />
was. To forget about the troubles of the past year and to hope for a better year to come. And his new<br />
best friend, Variety Jones, had come up with a brilliant, astounding, amazing idea to solve not only the<br />
Julia Problem but also the Richard Problem, the Erica Problem, and any other problem that could<br />
arise from people who found out he had created the site.<br />
Sure, if he was ever caught, Ross could hypothetically admit that sadly, yes, he had been<br />
involved in the early days of the Silk Road, but the site had just become too stressful. And if someone<br />
asked, “What did you do with the site after you stopped working on it?” Ross could respond that he<br />
“gave it away to someone else.” And if they asked, “To who?” he could simply say, “I don’t know<br />
who it was. All I know is that he called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.”
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