August 4, 2026
Ransom? More like ran-some-nerve
Blackmail Fail (2013)
He Said ‘Nice Try’ to Internet Blackmail—and the Comments Had a Field Day
TLDR: Gwern says several people tried to blackmail or dox him over his online identity, and he mostly refused to pay. Commenters treated it as part thriller, part farce, joking that the would-be villains seemed hilariously incompetent while others got distracted by nostalgia for the old internet.
This story has everything: ransom notes over obscure usernames, wild accusations about being the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, and an internet writer responding to it all with the energy of someone swatting away a mosquito. The basic plot is simple: Gwern, a writer known for covering Bitcoin and dark web markets, says people kept accusing him of being everyone from Silk Road boss Dread Pirate Roberts to Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Multiple people tried to pressure, threaten, or blackmail him. His response? Mostly: absolutely not.
But the real fun is in the crowd reaction. One commenter gleefully zoomed in on the sheer comedy of the failed villainy: “He replied with another malformed PGP-encrypted message”—which is basically internet-speak for “the blackmailer couldn’t even get the scary part right.” Another commenter was half baffled, half delighted, trying to explain the whole saga as, essentially, some guy who wanted privacy but also offered cash for people to expose him better. That contradiction became the thread’s favorite punchline.
Then came the nostalgia faction. One user drifted away from the blackmail drama entirely to mourn the long-dead social web, saying they missed Google+, Google Buzz, and FriendFeed. So yes, beneath the extortion chaos was a second comment-section soap opera: was this story a tale of online menace, or just a weird relic of the beautifully messy early-2010s internet? Either way, the consensus was clear: the crooks looked sloppy, the writer looked stubborn, and the comments were living for the absurdity.
Key Points
- •Gwern recounts multiple online extortion, blackmail, and doxing incidents from 2012 to 2015 connected to his public work on Bitcoin, cryptography, and darknet markets.
- •He says his research on Silk Road and other darknet-market topics led some people to wrongly accuse him of being figures such as Dread Pirate Roberts or Satoshi Nakamoto.
- •Gwern explicitly denies being Satoshi Nakamoto, Dread Pirate Roberts, a Bitcoin billionaire, or a high-level C++ peer-to-peer cryptography programmer.
- •The article details a September 2012 extortion attempt in which someone claimed to control 'gwern' and 'gwernbranwen' usernames on Pivory and demanded Bitcoin payment.
- •Gwern says he publicly refused to pay the Pivory ransom by posting a signed PGP message on Google+ and to a private mailing list.