https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-life-of-a-silk-road-20-mastermind
Come the day of the face-to-face, I stood in a busy city street, and waited for the man I had exchanged dozens of encrypted messages with. No phones, or internet enabled devices, naturally. We had communicated beforehand with PGP signed messages--meaning I was in contact with whoever controlled the DPR2 encryption keys listed alongside the site's administrator account.
He was late, but as promised, appeared out of nowhere.
"Do you hear the people sing?" I asked, starting our pre-arranged phrase to verify each other's identity.
"Singing the song of angry men," he replied, completing the lyrics from Les Miserables, his words barely audible over the sound of traffic. I ushered him inside a small doorway and bolted the entrance shut. Dressed in a generically smart style, he never would have stood out from a crowd. He was invisible.
He thought very highly of Defcon, the idiot who rented the server for SR2 with his personal email.
Take Defcon, who offered his services as a programmer to DPR2 in a private message. DPR2 was intrigued by Defcon's calm tone among the chaos of Silk Road being shut down, and put him to the test.
Within a few hours, Defcon had put what would become the Silk Road 2.0 forum online, along with a host of security features that others often neglect.
"He knew what he was doing, I could tell instantly," DPR2 said.
No mention of the two or three times the site got seriously hacked and lost a shitload of coins. I'm disappointed in Cox for writing such a obvious vanity piece.
My guess is that this probably isn't even DPR2. The impostor gets their kicks, and Vice gets clicks. Vice has no incentive to disprove this person's claims.
Or, even more insidiously, the whole thing is made up by the author.
Edit: Well shit, I missed the part about the PGP.