Gwern Branwen

And that if I continued contributing, I was often just kind of wasting my effort.

I began thinking about writing more on my own account and then moving into these kind of non-Wikipedia sorts of writings, right?

Like persuasive essays, nonfiction, commenting, or possibly even, you know, fiction writing.

Kind of like gently moving in the direction and beyond things like Reddit and less strong comments to starting my own kind of more long form writing.

Silk Road.

I've been a little bit interested in Bitcoin, but not too seriously interested in it because it was not obvious to me that it was going to work out or even honestly was like technologically feasible.

But when Adrian Chen wrote his Gawker article about buying LSD off of Silk Road, all of a sudden I did a complete 180.

I had this moment of like, holy shit, this is so real that you can literally buy drugs off of the internet with it.

So I looked into the Chen article, and it was very obvious to me that people wanted to know what the ordering process was like.

They wanted more details about what it's like because the article was just like very brief about that.

So I thought, OK, I'm interested in nootropics.

I'm interested in drugs.

I will go and use Silk Road and then I will document it for everyone instead of everyone kind of like pussyfooting around online and saying, oh, a friend of mine ordered off Silk Road and it worked.

None of that bullshit.

I will just document it straightforwardly.

So I ordered some Adderall, I think it was, and documented the entire process with screenshots and then wrote some more on the kind of like intellectual background.

And that was a huge hit when I published it.

It was hundreds of thousands of hits.

It's crazy.

Even today, when I go to the Google Analytics charts, you can still see Silk Road spiking vertically like crazy and then falling back down.