As most of you are aware, Silk Road has been under a denial of service (DoS) attack for the last few days with the site being virtually inaccessible for about 36 hours. This was the most sophisticated attack we've seen in the history of the site by far. I want to thank my team, and several volunteers from the community who quickly came to my aid and provided excellent support. You know who you are  Ironically, I would also like to thank the attacker. "What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" couldn't be more true here. We were forced to rethink our entire security system and configuration and are substantially more robust and hardened for having gone through this. I have zero respect for the attacker's tactics, but I have huge respect for his intellect, giving me confidence that we can and will overcome any future technology-based attacks on Silk Road. I want to mark this victory as a milestone in the ongoing story of our market by doing two things. One, we'll be having a sale effective immediately until midnight (UTC) on the 27th. All items on the site are commission free. I encourage any vendors who wish to join me in this to mark down their listings as much as they can. I am also publishing a document that is very important to me, the Silk Road Charter. It has been a work in progress for a very long time, and I am at last ready to share it with all of you. It has guided many incredibly difficult decisions I've had to make along the way and will continue to do so hopefully for years to come. Hopefully many of you can identify with and find inspiration in it. Here's the link: silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/silkroad/charter Your faithful servant, Dread Pirate Roberts UPDATE (04/26/2013 2130 UTC): FYI some vendors have their prices set AFTER including the commission, so their prices didn't change when I reduced the commission to zero. There are only about 7 vendors doing this, so it shouldn't be a widespread effect. Hopefully they and others will manually reduce their prices and pass on the savings to their customers. Either way, this is an impromptu sale and I'm not going to sweat it.