Silk Road Forums

Staff is actively trying to debug this issue, we are not yet sure of the cause. We have received many conflicting reports, and are investigating. It is affecting <1% of our userbase, and we can see who.

Apologies for the rough edges on the marketplace right now, ensuring operational security has taken a higher priority than fixing bugs these past two weeks.

Any plans to release some more detailed traffic data?

Sure, send me your ID scan and your street address and I'll mail you some fascinating data.

Any bulk vendors hurting for business?

UPDATE 3: The infrastructure upgrades are complete and the marketplace is stable.

UPDATE 2: We have pushed the window back to allow the developers more time to adjust the deployment approach. The window is now Jan 13th 13:15-16:15 UTC.

UPDATE: Planned downtime will occur Monday morning to resolve these page load issues, at Jan 13th 10:00-13:00 UTC.

Yesterday's infrastructure upgrades improved our deposit and withdrawal times, but now our page load times are not at the level of performance we expect to deliver.

We are working on further optimizations, which will require another window of downtime to launch. Expect slow page loads until these optimizations are pushed.

Growth pains are especially painful on the darknet since operational security is a always more pressing concern than server performance. We are working towards the balance between performance and maintaining a generic traffic footprint to keep our infrastructure safe from seizure.

We will announce the downtime window once we are confident. Expect two hours of downtime.

We are looking forward to getting these performance issues behind us, new features are always way more exciting to release than performance updates.

Thank you for your patience as we experience this growth, our traffic has doubled since Dec 10th despite the break and drama.

Defcon. I just wanted to bring to your attention in case you were not aware of some people in the Bugs section of the forum claiming there is a bug in the login system.

I have not been able to replicate it myself, but it might be worth looking into in case you have not already. I am sure you are aware of its presence or lack thereof.

This was resolved yesterday, but thank you for bringing it up. We were aware of it, but CAPTCHA was way lower on the priority list than speeding up withdrawals.

It's good that you haven't been able to reproduce it!

Get well soon Defcon.

Thanks all. Not dead yet.

I'm actually DPR, Chemmy is Ross's lawyer, Stealth was a member of Seal Team Six. Nightcrawler once took control of my botnet and DDoSd Tor Market. Yoda has the force. Coachella found the forum server but exploded once his adrenaline and meth levels reached critical mass. Now he haunts it.

do your research, this guy is full of lies

- StExo

Silence is scary.

Agreed, the timing of this issue was not ideally aligned with my schedule.

I was simply away from the darknet for OPSEC reasons, unaware of the issue.

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(NOTE: If you have been away, you should catch up on recent events: http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=12055.0 )

Silk Road Community,

As you are aware, a critical part of our emergency Contingency Plan failed last week.

Despite this failure, staff received a message yesterday which imparted incredible news.

The Captain is a man of his word.

He has returned the majority of the escrow cold storage wallets, and is working with us to restore the remaining private keys from backups.

70% of all pending balances and escrows will be repaid within the next twelve hours, and the remaining 30% will be repaid on Monday. We are distributing the escrow to the top 70% of users first who had the most BTC at risk.

This involves custom accounting code, so I am pushing back today's release of new features to Sunday to ensure no corners are cut.

You will notice thirty minutes of market downtime today while we reconcile the balances.

On behalf of staff, we are incredibly grateful for your support during this very stressful time.

Your supportive reactions to our grim announcement were very unexpected, and made this fog of war way easier for everyone to navigate.

This is one incredible community.

I am now confident that, had the worst case scenario occurred and if today's date were May 1st 2014, most of you would still be here supporting us.

That level of commitment is completely unheard of in the darknet.

If we can remain this strong during difficult times, I have no doubt that this movement will withstand any trial thrown at us.

The Captain has decided to remain in hiding until further notice. He is safe, and his PGP key was not compromised. He has confirmed his identity using all of our contingency methods.

Captain - thank you. You have made massive personal sacrifices for us, especially over the past month. May none of us ever fully know your story. May your mother never post from your Facebook account. You had the opportunity to take everything like a true "criminal", yet you remained loyal to our cause. Such an exhibit of admin honesty is unheard of in darknet history and a huge inspiration to us.

Let our Captain's selfless actions reaffirm that we are a movement first and a marketplace second.

You are Silk Road. By participating in this community, you are playing your part in a pivotal turning point in world history.

Governments are losing control. Power is in the hands of the people.

We will tirelessly defend free trade and free speech until it's no longer a crime to do so.

If you're only here for money, go ahead and become an FBI informant.

Our movement does not live for profit.

Silk Road exists to liberate the world from economic oppression.

Defcon

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UPDATE: 100% of cold storage has been returned.