Don't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and besides this SpaceX idea, I remember him telling me 2 weeks before the arrest about another unrelated project he was trying to get a team together for so he could apply to Y Combinator. Never once did I hear anything hinting at involvement with the Silk Road, but he always talked about a million ideas at once. Anyone who knew him for long knew that he traveled a lot for years and years (back in 2010 he was the first person I knew who jumped on Jet Blue's special offer of a month of unlimited travel for only $600), so the author would've realized that was routine if he knew him for long. I do find the author's story very plausible.
Lots of plausibly lucrative subprojects also make a good cover story and/or attempt at money laundering for someone running a drug trading platform.
Seems more likely that this was his intention (or, as you say, he genuinely thought he might be able to flog it to his ex-employer) rather than getting design work for part of the back end for the Silk Road. If he wanted an analytics package for his trading platform, surely he'd have just told the blog post author he was subcontracting an analytics package for a very boring company under NDA's trading platform rather than trying to disguise his design brief as curiosity-inducing stuff like metrics for rocket launches?
> his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. . . it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX
> I do find the author's story very plausible.
Aren't these statements completely contradictory?
On the one hand, you say it was a SpaceX project. But later, you say that the author is correct (meaning it was a Silk Road project).
A little confusing, I know, and it doesn't help that the HN title is currently different from the blog post title. I find it plausible that the author was wondering what the project was really for, because it wasn't an official SpaceX project. It wasn't even contracted by SpaceX, but rather intended to be completed and then pitched to SpaceX and hopefully sold to SpaceX. But the author wouldn't have had any interaction with SpaceX and therefore is wondering to this day whether there was a real chance that SpaceX would have ever used this code.
Edit: That being said, I'm a little surprised the author thinks this code would've been used for anything related to Silk Road.
