Are there holes in the timeline that connected Ulbricht to Silk Road? Because that timeline didn't really leave any time for there to have been a first DPR.

Reports indicate that the original DPR retired to Patagonia 15 years ago, and has been living like a king ever since.

How does work? Wikipedia says that the silk road started in February of 2011. And if that was months, it would still only give him around a year and a half on the site.

Princess Bride joke.

This one's the Fed Pirate Roberts :p

The way this site launched so soon after the original was shut down--with the same name, same styling, even the same "Dread Pirate Roberts" moniker--makes me very suspicious.

Meh, nothing more than a recursive wget will do that.

I am beginning to see the significance of the name "Dread Pirate Roberts".

In The Princess Bride, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/ it was actually a title that was handed down, and the current Dread Pirate Roberts is the third one.

The Princess Bride has wonderfully quotable dialogue, e.g. "Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts."

Forbes interviewed DPR (Ulbricht or not) in August.

"Roberts isn’t actually the site’s founder, he revealed in our interview. He credits Silk Road’s creation to another, even more secretive entrepreneur whom he declined to tell me anything about and who may have used the “Dread Pirate Roberts” nom de guerre before it was assumed by the person I interviewed."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-th...

Yeah, he was just saying that to throw people off his trail.

NOTE: I live in Austin and am acquaintances with a few people who knew him a bit while he was here.

From what I understand, at the time of Silk Road's creation, he was not nearly technically capable of creating a site like it. He seems to have learned enough to administer and update the site, but the initial construction was done by another.

SR was just a glorified rails app, and my understanding was that it was initially pretty buggy. It's within reason that someone could pick up the knowledge they need within a few months to build such a thing, at least enough to get it rolling.

I thought it used PHP? At least the question on StackOverflow that allegedly led to his demise asked about PHP issues.

I don't actually know - what I mean is, it's a basic CRUD app without much special sauce.

It used CodeIgniter (PHP).