Lots of you have kindly messaged me recently offering your assistance and some have offered bitcoins to donate to the project and as many of you know I have not accepted funding, I feel others having a financial stake in Silk Road is not beneficial but I digress. One of the greatest risks we face which we cannot solve as operators is that of network traffic analysis, that is monitoring the traffic through the tor network and over time this will increase the statistical probability of being able to positively identify hidden services and users. Most of the time spent on our security issues is hardening the servers, reducing single points of failure and preventing front-end exploits and these are not usually announced or discussed publicly as to minimize what law enforcement may know of our technical set up, capabilities and staff. To reduce this threat however - we need help. The problem of network/traffic analysis is that it cannot be simply "fixed" as a bug would be and our best measure to counteract it is to make the task more difficult, take longer and be more expensive for our adversaries, hopefully dissuading them from the task as spending vast sums of money and man power even for law enforcement is not feasible if it is not considered a reasonably cost-effective operation. This was first put to me as the old problem of finding a needle in a haystack: there is finite space within the network and as you analyze more of it you are reducing the space you know it will definitely be and so you can focus your attentions. With enough time and data, identifying our servers would actually be a trivial task for the NSA which is not an admission I make lightly. As far as threats from law enforcement is concerned we know they are the only organization along with GCHQ capable of mounting an effective assault. I would like to add that despite all of this what will seem to many as a very dangerous threat against them, it is very unlikely they will undertake such a task against one individual unless your pseudonym is Dread Pirate Roberts. However, for those who ask why does it concern them, it is because if this tactic could possibly unmask people, it can certainly unmask the servers and thus any data you have stored there. If we return to the analogy of the needle in the haystack, one could argue to reduce the size of the needle which is a valid point but is a pessimistic view of the situation - I would propose we simply increase the size of the haystack. To increase the size of the network means adding more relays, exits nodes, users, hidden services and bandwidth. By doing this, we are giving law enforcement and our adversaries considerably more work and analysis to do in order to unmask us and I uphold we will never be totally safe from the NSA, but we can certainly put them off by making it far less cost-effective. There are 3 ways anyone can help and also I will clarify Silk Road's position on how we are helping to address the matter ourselves too. In an ideal world, everyone using Tor would act as a relay, but we understand not everybody can. Being a relay or exit node (exit nodes are less suitable on home connections) is as simple as enabling the relaying option on the Vidalia control panel but you may not see much traffic if your relay is not maintained or kept online. Users with small home servers would be ideally placed to host a home relay as it may run 24/7 and provide a highly distributed network. In the old forums astor composed a great guide to setting up your own relay which I will re-post below, but you can find the original post here: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=202510.0 Remember - hosting a relay is not illegal and you have no legal liabilities for Tor content in almost every country although I would still advise asking a lawyer if unsure, therefore you do not actually need to register these anonymously although there are still options mentioned in the guide for anonymous servers or ones which accept bitcoin. Setting a relay on a VPS or dedicated servers allows greater availability, uptime and you don't need to worry over the hardware maintenance. For how little a VPS costs (a few bucks a month) you are making massive contributions to the network. The average user on this forum would only consume a small amount of megabytes per hour they browse so even if you can only provide 10Gb worth of bandwidth a month (less than 5kb/s), you would be a net contributor on the network, although for latency purposes I would recommend relaying only if you can provide 40kb/s+, even just for 1 day. Of all 3 - this is least secure way of going about improving the network but for many it is the only realistic option due to lack of technical expertise or legal problems such as a vendor not wanting to have a tor relay tied to his or her name. Some non-profit organizations currently taking bitcoin donations and turning them into more bandwidth are NoiseTor (noisetor.net) and TorServers (torservers.net). If you cannot do either of the above, I would absolutely recommend donating any spare bitcoins to one of these organizations, even if it is just a few cents ($1 = approx 16Gb of bandwidth on typical hosts). The concern of only donating or relying on a handful of organizations to control a vast amount of the network is that if they become compromised or are complicit with law enforcement, this actually can increase the risk of traffic analysis since they have more data to work from. So, only use this option if the first two are not realistic in your circumstances and you still want to help. Within our new bounties section, it has attracted a lot of attention of my recent post outlining our search for a relay operator who can manage high-bandwidth relays and exit nodes for us. To make this understood, these relays have no connection to the servers which host our forums or the ones which are hosting the market. What we have taken to is leading by example in this problem though. Although the figures presented by the FBI were heavily distorted (see OzFreelancer's blog: http://allthingsvice.com/2013/10/18/about-this-1-2-billion-crap/), there is no question running Silk Road is an extremely profitable avenue and I think investing a fair sized portion of those profits is a fair way to give back to the community and the network. As a result on the day the market launches (not long now) I will be establishing a Relay Fund to cover the costs of running a cluster of new relays, with $5,000 set aside for the first month which will grow as the market does. This amount I hope will transfer at least several hundred terabytes of data. Pending further investigation, we are also penning several reimbursement programs and incentives (such as donation matching), both for our own causes (ie Tor relays) and other general charities (Erowid, Lifeboat Association, Archive.org etc). I hope you all can take the time to join the fight and help me help you for a faster, safer and more diverse network.