Silk Road Forums

We found the issue, deposits are back to ~30 minute time range.

http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=35918.0

1) Do you have an ETA on final repayments of pending balances or the new type of escrow to be introduced.
2) When will those with vendor bonds in pending escrow but have met all the criteria to get it back even if it only changes from pending escrow to pending balance?
3) What is happening about transactions made a while ago that have now been 'archived' by SR, how will these be resolved and is there any ETA on when the coin will be returned for these.

1) Do you have an ETA on final repayments of pending balances or the new type of escrow to be introduced.

Final repayments: mid-June at current sales rate. I personally hope May will be possible once word spreads when our safer escrow solution launches.

As to the escrow launch date, it's approaching fast but we are not ready to commit to an exact date yet.

2) When will those with vendor bonds in pending escrow but have met all the criteria to get it back even if it only changes from pending escrow to pending balance?

Vendor Bonds will be repaid last, once all pending balances and escrows are repaid. Our rationale here is that victims of the SR1 seizure did not get their bonds back. We want to boost buyer confidence by prioritizing their repayment, as there are thousands more buyers than vendors.

3) What is happening about transactions made a while ago that have now been 'archived' by SR, how will these be resolved and is there any ETA on when the coin will be returned for these.

No balances are affected by our security measures, no coins were lost due to any of our data retention policies.

Thank you for supporting the road. We're not a quick-scam marketplace, Silk Road is a movement and a strong community. Staff is fighting for you.

Thank you for benchmarking this. What is your testing methodology? How often are you clicking Refresh Deposits?

Speeds are looking very fast now that the login issue is fixed, interested to see test #4.

This error has been resolved. We are making many small enhancements throughout the day while watching the new Bitcoin infrastructure under a real-world Monday load. Apologies for the inconveniences this caused over the past two hours.

Hello Community,

Our development staff had a very busy weekend.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our upgraded Bitcoin infrastructure, as well as our Support Center.

Support Center

We are not content with our track record in the customer service category. Staff has performed exceptionally considering the massive backlog of support requests our team has been buried under - but we are very dissatisfied with our own response times.

It's time for Silk Road Support to change. We are proud to introduce a new Silk Road Support team (who will remain anonymous), and the launch of our Support Center.

We are committed to providing the best customer service in the darknet.

A much smoother Silk Road customer experience is ahead, and our new support team will be critical to our community's continued success.

Welcome to the new Support hires!

Faster Deposits, Negative Balances Fixed

Staff has completed major upgrades to our Bitcoin infrastructure to better serve our growing community.

In you missed the "Known Bitcoin Issues" thread, here is context: http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=34796.0

This improved architecture will provide:

1. Exponentially faster deposit and withdrawal times
2. Increased server anonymity
3. Automatic resolution of missing deposits and negative balances upon next login

If you have been experiencing the negative balance bug, your account should correct itself within thirty minutes of your next login. If it does not, contact our support team.

We all agree that our unpredictably-slow Bitcoin transactions and support delays have been unacceptable. We hold ourselves to a much higher standard and are committed to continually improving your marketplace.

Many more updates are in store for this week.

Let's get this community repaid.

Defcon

Defcon, what did you say, how long we must wait before we send some new moiney to SR=?

It's safe to make deposits now, but expect them to take longer than normal to process. They will not be lost, no deposits are lost. Our transaction queue is simply overloaded, and we are working on launching more servers in our infrastructure to process it quicker.

Dear Defcon,

I cannot accept that a transfer made at 10:18am UTC still is not available. For sure you know that bitcoins are a very volatility currency. Nothing to add.

Hi Langstrumpf. We are not content with the performance of our Bitcoin infrastructure either. It is under incredible load, and we are working hard on upgrading it. Apologies for the delay, these are growing pains due to our recent high transaction volume. Check the "Known Bitcoin Issues" sticky in Silk Road Discussion for more information.

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that sales have surged this week. We have seen a faster pace of repayments than ever before.

The bad news is that our Bitcoin infrastructure is very overloaded processing all of the deposits and withdraws the community is initiating.

No deposits are lost. No withdrawals are lost.

We are scaling our Bitcoin infrastructure today and tomorrow to better handle the load.

This is the largest operating BTC system in the darknet. I wish I could disclose how many transactions we are processing per minute, it is mind-blowing.

We have a plan for launching an upgraded infrastructure which will last us for years to come, built on lessons learned while scaling this covert infrastructure.

Summary of known BTC issues:
1. Deposits are slow. The community is spending their repayments, and depositing even more coins as confidence boosts. We've seen more deposited coins over the past four days than in the entire month of Feb. This is awe-inspiring, and also an incredible strain on our Bitcoin infrastructure. We are working on scaling our infrastructure to even more servers to better handle the demand. This is very difficult due to the nature of our business, but we are very committed to preserving server anonymity and security throughout this process, which makes the upgrades slow.
2. Withdrawals made during yesterday's downtime were not relayed to the Bitcoin network. We are working on deleting any withdrawals from your transaction history which have unrelayed TXIDs, to allow you to withdraw the coins again. If you saw a server error when trying to withdraw coins, you are likely being affected by this problem. Resolving this is our top priority.
3. Inaccurate Balances in some users' accounts. If your balance is negative, or if coins in your account before the attack never showed up as Pending Balance/Escrow, you are affected by this bug. Early tests show that our fix for slow deposits will also resolve this bug.

We will post a full update this weekend with the results of our upgrades, as well as a community repayment update.

Staff is blown away by your dedication to this community even through rough times. Thank you for your patience. We're making great progress on getting everyone repaid, and it's because if your resilience through unpleasant delays like this.

On behalf of the victims of the attack: a heartfelt thank you for buying and vending here.