Dread Pays $1,000 XMR for Good Writing

Dread just turned 8 years old, and HugBunter decided to celebrate by paying people to write. (for links to dread use my othersite: darknetdaily.live it's under 'forums')

The contest is straightforward. Write something original, post it to one of 10 qualifying subdreads, and compete for $1,000 in Monero. Second place gets $500, third gets $250, and runner-ups walk away with either premium Dread membership or $50 in XMR. The deadline is March 1st, 2026, and entries are capped at one per week per user.

Now I want to talk about HugBunter for a second because this guy has been running Dread since February 2018, which in darknet years is roughly equivalent to running a small country through 47 consecutive civil wars. He launched the platform right after Reddit nuked r/DarkNetMarkets and every related subreddit in March 2018, and Dread still exists 8 years later as the primary hub for darknet discussion, and that alone says more than any mission statement. His account shows 11,248 karma, 120 posts, and 6,578 comments over those 8 years, which is the kind of engagement most platform founders abandon after year one.

The qualifying subdreads cover exactly the communities you'd expect: /d/DarkNetMarkets, /d/HarmReduction, /d/DarknetMarketsNoobs, /d/OpSec, /d/Monero, /d/OpSecNoobs, /d/hackingNoobs, /d/oniondev, /d/programming, and /d/pgp. Content needs to be informative, creative, or helpful, and HugBunter specifically mentioned guides and relevant stories as examples. If you want to submit to a subdread outside that list, you can crosspost with mod approval.

One rule stands out: no AI. If your submission looks like it was generated by ChatGPT or Claude or any other model, you're disqualified. Meanwhile the rest of the internet is drowning in AI-generated garbage, every major platform flooded with bot-written content and SEO-optimized nonsense, and here's Dread saying "write it yourself or don't bother."

HugBunter also noted that entries need to be tagged as contest submissions with a link back to the original announcement post. The 20,000 character limit on Dread posts is a factor too, and at least one user already hit it before finishing their piece, so if your submission runs long, you can continue in the comments.

The community response was immediate. An exchange called b1exch donated $3,000 to cover the contest's expenses, specifically noting they wanted to make sure there were no financial constraints on Dread itself. Another user, maestrodutch, offered an additional $1,000 to double the prizes. HugBunter confirmed that DarkMatter has sponsored several future contests as well, which means this is going to become a regular thing.

The comments got interesting fast when people started asking what actually qualifies. One user asked about submitting a guide on money laundering, specifically setting up fake taxable businesses, and HugBunter said he hadn't intended the contest to produce guides for illegal activity, which prompted a pretty sharp exchange. The user pointed out, correctly, that the entire basis of /d/OpSec is essentially how to do things without getting caught, and that carving out "legal content only" from a darknet forum is a weird line to draw. HugBunter acknowledged this, admitted he wrote the rules quickly without much thought, and clarified that what he really meant was he wanted content that was more about the underlying principles of anonymity and privacy rather than step-by-step instructions for specific crimes. The distinction he landed on: a guide about physical OPSEC practices is fine, but "how to safely rob banks" is just using OPSEC as a wrapper for something that belongs in a different category.

Most platform admins would retroactively edit their rules and pretend the original version never existed, or double down on wording that clearly missed their intent. HugBunter just said "yeah, I wrote this fast, here's what I actually meant" and the community moved on. Dread's been around 8 years. Most competitors haven't made it past 2.

Another fun detail from the comments: someone submitted an entire Wikipedia-style biographical article about Samwhiskey, a long-time moderator who's been around since the r/DarkNetMarkets days on Reddit. The article traced his history from Reddit in 2014 through the subreddit bans in 2018 and into his moderation work on Dread, complete with member counts and karma statistics. Whether that qualifies for the contest is debatable, but someone sat down and wrote a structured, sourced biographical piece about a darknet forum moderator, and I think that's pretty cool.

The contest also drew out people who clearly just want the money, which is completely fine and part of what makes it work. One user flat out said "I was going to take my time finishing it but with a thousand dollars on the line I can speed it up." Another asked if they could trade the first-place prizes for moderator certification instead of the XMR. A third user said they needed to get some Adderall before they could give it a real shot. Dread incentivizing content creation with Monero while maintaining a ban on AI slop is exactly why this community keeps going when others don't.

Dread has survived DDoS attacks, law enforcement operations, and market collapses over 8 years, and instead of just keeping the lights on, HugBunter is actively investing in the community that uses it. Creating financial incentives for original, human-written content on a platform that runs entirely on Tor and pays out in Monero while every major tech company races to replace writers with AI. I mean, imagine that.

The deadline is March 1st. If you're on Dread and you can string together 20,000 characters of something worth reading, there's $1,750 in Monero waiting for whoever earns it.