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by m_ram 4602 days ago
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...

1 comments

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).