Quote from: omnis on April 07, 2013, 02:00 pmHi,that's disturbing news. I don't see why an increased bond for future vendors would make old vendors non eligible for their past bonds.If the bonds were exposed, which is what I read, by December 2012 bonds paid in mid 2012 were worth almost double the 500$ of new bonds. How is taking this money justified and what is it used for?omnisVendors who paid $150 didn't purchase a bond, they paid a fee. There is a distinct difference between the two; the bond is different from the fee in the sense that it is held by Silk Road to ensure that a vendor does not scam buyers, the caveat being that if the vendor does scam buyers they will not get their bond back. The fee was simply an amount of money paid to Silk Road in order to contribute to the running and upkeep of the site, and being a fee - by its very definition - was non-refundable. A bond, by its definition, is refundable or exchangeable to the value of the bond.Previously to the bond being brought in instead of a vendor fee, the vendor fees were used to pay for server costs etc., until the fees grew large enough to be able to support the site without the need for a vendor fee.Silk Road did not 'take' your money, you paid it to them willingly in order to purchase vending privileges. If the bond system were to be applied retroactively then Silk Road would have to pay out an incredibly large amount of Bitcoin to all previous vendor account holders, possibly bankrupting Dread Pirate Roberts as some vendors paid 50+ BTC for their account when prices were ~$3.00. Those 50 BTC would now be worth $8,248.00, and having to refund hundreds, if not thousands of vendors BTC at today's value would mean no more Silk Road.As stated, the vendor fees were cashed out and used to pay for the actual running and upkeep of the site. The vendor bonds are simply held at an address thereby making the volatile BTC value a non-issue, meaning that refunding legitimate vendors does not cost 55 times more than what they actually paid.- grahamgreene