If all goes according to plan and no more problems, we will be looking to launch the market on the 5th November, 16:20 UTC and we will release the URL and accounts here at the same time I release them to vendors so you can have a nosy around 24 hours in advance and gather any screenshots or information you might want.
The below covers our basic fee and bond structure which was posted on the roundtable several days ago:
Many of you have asked and this is our fee structure so far. This is still subject to change dependent on several factors but it is unlikely we will be making any significant changes. All fees are cumulative which we feel is a fair balance between high volume vendors and bulk vendors.
$0-$499: 8%
$500-$4,999: 6%
$5,000-$9,999: 5%
$10,000-$19,999: 4.5%
$20,000+: 4%
Therefore if you conducted $30,000 in sales, you would pay just $1409.77 in total fees and an additional $30,000 would incur only $1200 more thereafter. We feel this is a very good rate for both vendors, buyers and Silk Road.
The initial vendor bond will be set at $200 and will be raised over time depending on the response and the prevalence of scammers, but it will likely rise to the $400-$500 region within 3-6 months. The vendor bond will be refunded after $1500 in value of transactions across 40 or more positive transactions.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but for the first few hours into public release there may be problems getting onto the server. Load balancing over Tor is very difficult and quite frankly nobody but the previous DPR has any experience whatsoever in dealing with this kind of traffic so we are using only our instincts on how to solve this problem which may or may not work. We are hoping with the botnet taken down from the Tor network now plus our high speed servers we will be able to create a high availability Silk Road with good access speeds but until we've faced the massive traffic influx, we won't truly know.
Any questions as usual feel free to ask below.
