Michael Mayes is a senior writer and researcher at Armor, a cloud security-as-a-service provider in Richardson, Texas. His career in technology communications includes work with the Human Genome Project, handheld software during the Palm and Pocket PC era, blockchain development and cybersecurity. He began his research in black markets in 2013 during a PhD year in professional and technical writing at the University of Memphis where he wrote on the early days of Bitcoin and its defining proof of concept, the Silk Road.