Bitcoin Forum

If it continues to be down, this weekend? Next week?

if Silk Road is down for ever

i'd buy up ALL the bitcoins, because you just watch as 5 new SilkRoad wannabees all pop up

I doubt it will.. It always goes down... seems like a regular thing lately..

well hopefully they will do some upgrade soon, if not i hope someone can make a better tor site that can handle the traffic 

They did just do an upgrade.... It seemed quicker for a little while....




Try that reloaded site... it's similar...  a handful of vendors from sr are there.

Why didn't they already? Independently of SR being up or down.
My guess it doing that takes a while and you'd have to find the guts and environment to do it.

Because the risk/cost is X and while SR is open the reward is X/5 and when SR is down the reward is 5X.

More like a factor of two for the first one.
  And it depends, if silkroad is beyond their load capacity already it might not even cut into their profit at all just provide a service where silkroad cannot handle it any more.

SR volume is a tiny fraction of Bitcoin economy. There are convincing estimates based on the academic study of SR published about four months ago.

Silk Road being down is more bullish than anything. The reason it's having trouble is the sheer amount of new users. It's growing too fast.

That is a so called positive problem.

If it's down indefinitely, then the price will tank (for some time) but that is unlikely to be the case.

SR is offline apparently because of huge traffic levels. Anyone who would sell btc on this news is pretty silly :)

That would indeed be silly. Actually selling BTC based on the belief that Silk Road will make or break it is pretty silly regardless.

But out of curiosity, who made this apparent?

I call bullshit on that. If you were writing the truth you'd cite that study in detail. But you didn't.


It did make it so it can break it. But not necessarily so, it just might.
This is speculation remember? We deal with possibilities...

obv I have no idea of the numbers, but it's the answer to your question of why not yet.

I am not saying that the first statement is correct but I think maybe he was referring to this

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1   (chapter 5.2 "Transaction volumes")

paper.

DoS attacks are really easy against Tor hidden services. The service can't block the attacker because all clients are anonymous. Tor hidden service introduction points can sometimes also be DoS-attacked. I wouldn't use Tor to run a site like this.

Thanks.  
I can also see why it wasn't cited, nobody with a straight mind would seriously consider the total transaction value of the Blockchain to be trade economic activity. And according to that paper SR even has 5-7% of that.
You can easily double that if you consider that people have to buy the bitcoins somewhere, triple it if you consider that the wares are usually bought for fiat the first time and then double to triple  that figure again to account for mixing.

It's obvious that SR accounts for the majority of real economic activity even by that paper as it is obvious any bitcointalk member sharing the "bitcoinsm" philosophy will deny it whenever possible. Even to the point of purposefully misinterpreting the facts.

What would you suggest? I2P, Freenet?

I hope you are right then, and SR has been captured by the evil-doers, so that the exchange rate crashes, and people can buy cheaper Bitcoin again, before the drug kids come back online with their usual demand + the backlog...  ;D

I'm not talking about panic selling, I'm talking about a price drop because they're aren't enough buyers to sustain the current bid/ask wall.

what would you use to run a site like that?

Sorry, but its a bullshit. ddos attacks on Tor isnt effective because of connection latency (ping is from 1 up to infinity seconds).

Defending from attacking bots making 1 connection per second isnt a problem.

The problem is to run Tor software on large botnet for attacker.

Tor should protect against certain DDOS attacks but certainly not all of them.

Usually a DDOS exploits the resources allocated by the webserver not the IP stack because it provides a larger area of attack.

Sorry, but that's bullshit.  Latency does not make one lick of difference if one physical computer can create as many simultaneous requests as it is capable of sending with no way for the server to detect they are from the same machine.  Now imagine 1,000 such machines and you have a very small botnet taking out silkroad.

Freenet is probably the best, though I'm not confident enough in its security to use it for anything serious. I like the design of GNUnet a lot, but the software sucks. I2P or Tor with a distributed data store would be good.

I wouldn't run a site like this at all with the currently available tools.

Two million per month. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdf

That, and welcome to my "ignore" list.

Relax:

http://(link to SR forum removed)/index.php?topic=70572.0

Quote from the SR forum:

"I am so sorry to leave you guys hanging for so long wondering what is going on with the site today. Let me just make everything clear and reassure you all that Silk Road has NOT been compromised, DPR has NOT been busted, and EVERYTHING IS OKAY!

Yes, we are having some technical difficulties. We have been making some serious overhauls and changes to the system, server, and website. While I cannot tell you exactly what is wrong today, I can assure you that we will fix it and have it back up soon. By soon, I mean I would be shocked if we didn't have it back up by Monday.

Please, I beg of you, don't start spreading any unnecessary rumors that will surely stir up chaos, fear, and confusion amongst out community.

..."

Too bad you didn't read my response, since somebody went ahead and linked it before you.
But anyway: If you read this... you are doing it wrong.. harharhar  ;D (seriously I like to be on your ignore list and stay on it if you are that ignorant)

I would bet dude's making a nice chunk of "Coins" doing it......

"How long till we tank?"

Probably till DPR or someone with say announces some serious trouble (like that they were busted, hacked, decided to run with the purse,..) or till 1 week without communication of any officials and no uptime, my guess.

It just realized that sellers are unable to dump their coins on the market too. I assume most of their coins are sold off-exchange, so as that market dries up for those coin buyers they may seek on-exchange purchases. Makes me wonder if it could actually make the market go up, hmm.

It's a zero sum game besides the fundamental effect since most SR costumers buy their BTC and immediately spend them.

I'd use i2p if Tor was compromised.  Setting up i2p is only a little more challenging than downloading Tor tools, since these are usually pre-configured for the user.  I2P requires some study to understand how it works and how to use it, and a lot of i2p services are hacked together from different projects, so they take some effort to learn how to use them effectively.  This can also make i2p seem significantly more secure, so it seems like a logical place to launch a service similar to SR.  Getting vendors to sign on to an eepsite instead of an onion website is the real challenge, but when there is a market niche to fill, smart entrepreneurs will step up to the challenge.

NEVER!  :D

You are now on my ignore list too, because you respond to good arguments with verbal abuse, condescension and anger, and we all here need to see less of your behavior.

No I'm not, but again since you responded to me, you are doing it wrong. But one thing: Please continue posting with this account so that you receive an "established member" status and I receive my ignore point.

Because it will tank slowly since if SR would be gone for good people would still believe it would come back up eventually.

Sorry if I spoiled it now :P

Not sure if SR is still down, but btc exchange rate has increased almost 4% since this thread started.

prolly gonna be fine / page is loading / or DEA took 3 days to install pots and fill them with honey:

http://s17.postimage.org/orzhf4a1n/silk_road_coming_BACK.jpg

IMO everything seems fine on DPR's ship.

Theymos You shocked me! Where You will host Silk Road if not Tor for it to not be found and taken down? Freenet, I2P?

The .onion server cannot block the anonymous traffic, but also the attackers cannot utilize several orders of magnitude superior bandwidth because they are forced to use Tor and nodes have varying speeds. They can set up own nodes and force Tor to connect though them but even then only the guard nodes will be DDoSed.

With clearnet server also the blocking helps only partially. With powerful enough botnet the upstream links will fail. If someone set us up the botnet, we are on our way to destruction :)

Nobody talks about maintenance, it's about the possibility of it being gone for good.
Remember: In any cases where something blew up here it was stalling for a while before it became generally accepted.

Also see my sig v

I predict that the price of my bitcoins will be unaffected by SR.

Then you are the sucker.

I think you are the sucker.  I have evidence that SR isn't down.  I have no intention of presenting said evidence, or even describing it's nature; but I suggest you check your Tor instance.

Oh, how so. I have made my profits already.  My remaining coins are $100 each. Take it or leave it.  :)

YEah, I've long been in the same place.  It's impossible for me to have lost any spending power overall, even if BTC goes to zero.

Then it's you against the rest of the world again, been there done that.

This reminds me: I really ought to create a thread about this Bitcoinism thing. It's getting rampant on the forums again.

please do.

i do not know what Bitcoinism is

lol'd

SR got problems with heavy load in past. Don't worry it is too profitable for operators to be abandoned!

A surprising result is the tight coupling between Silk Road and the Bitcoin market – the daily sales on Silk Road correspond to almost 20% of the average daily volume of USD-BTC exchanges on Mt.Gox, the largest exchange forum.

Doesn't look like SR volume is a tiny fraction of bitcoin economy  ;)

If botnet was used to setup tor nodes. How many would be necessary to locate silkroad server? Is that possible?

It's not down, it's in maintenance mode.

I know.

Nevertheless... I stand corrected.

ok. and what's bitcoinism?

I think something among the line that BTC transactions can be either scams or not. Like Schrödinger's cat being either dead or alive, you can't really tell unless you open the box.

You mean like in ElectricMucus' signature?

 How long before the price tanks sharply because Silk Road is down?

Demand for small transactions are down both here and on OTC - probably because of SR.

There has also been very little movement in the price (despite Kentroller's minor pump and dump efforts on Monday.)

What there has been is a significant amount of off-marketing buying. 

(Why is TC always out of coin??).

We'll see big price movements soon.

how do you know there is significant off-market buying?


The direction is relevant ;>.

I agree there will be volatility not seen for a long time and I've stated I believe the upside will win.

I'm long.

Tangible Cryptology can't seem to keep coin in stock.  You could probably do the math based on his thread updates.  If I had to guess he's easily moving up to 10K BTC/week by now.

Other signals here on the boards and IRC that indicate a lot of large private buying is going on.

A little bit more than that but 10K is conservative. ;)

When it comes to Bitcoin online retail there is a new player in town. http://www.bitcoinstore.com/ (http://www.bitcoinstore.com/) which can have a greater market impact on the BTC / USD rate than SilkRoad, and without the "legal" issues.

I only wish their was a Canadian version of this kind of site....

shipping is just to damn high for International shipping

The study estimated ~$2M in sales per month. MtGox volume is ~$10M per mo th, being ~65% of the total volume of all "legitimate" exchanges. Add to this OTC. SR is at most 10% of trade volume. Note, most SR merchants would not use AML-compliant exchanges anyway.
Further proving that there is no coupling is the fact that - despite this thread - the price did not sink at all, on the contrary.

Silk Road probably have configured guard nodes and not selected on random. I don't know exactly how many nodes will take to compromise majority of circuits but it will require hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Ant the compromising of Tor by single entity holding majority of relays will help only against clearnet traffic going trough Tor. For hidden services timing attack is still best that can be done. I'm not expert on this maybe someone can explain more on this subject.

Try to guess why the Tor network have become much much faster then it was ever before?

And the SR is up and running as well as SR forums. And no major change in price.

They have added USPS as an option and now shipping rates a very reasonable and competitive.

There have been sites like that one for a long time. The one your referring to has the worst java script I have seen a while. It's not going to amount to anything.

as long as it takes to churn to a new hosting company again.

who cares about shipping cost when all products cost 0.0 BTC ;-)

Registration for new members is open again.

buy buy buy??

 ;D

:) time is now

What is the lesson we learned from the title of this thread and the past two weeks of bitcoin price?

We learned that SR was down for only two days and the majority of this thread is a waste of disk space and bandwidth.

That when SR goes down, the supply of BTC goes down because sellers are unable to cash out. Therefore, the price goes up.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to the price if it was down for a month. Not sure how it would go either way.

Two posts above yours: