i never claimed they would trace SR even if they could. They will use it for a human intelligence honeypot long before that. They might never even take the thing down even if they took control of the server. Human intelligence is by far the most worrying thing. Nym sybil attacks are cheap to do on silk road and there is no trust rank system or connection to private groups to prevent someone from flooding nyms. Charging for seller accounts adds somewhat of a limitation to the size of their flood, but they do have a lot of money. Selling accounts is actually a great security measure on SR's part, although if it isnt a flat rate price it should be im not sure if it is currently auctioned off but an auction can be gamed easier by a malicious SR to tilt human intelligence nodes towards the feds. I actually have some good cryptographic solutions for a secure membership recruitment system that attempts to maintain anonymity while verifying presence in a community prior to a certain date (assuming that at some point in time feds will begin massively nym flooding public internet drug discussion forums with nyms to poison the 'probably not a fed' recruitment well) interception is also always a worry even if you are sound on the human intelligence front, but we were working on developing a technical solution to this based on measurement and signature intelligence themes, check out the interception detection thread in security subforum here if you are interested in the technical details and of course the privacy wars will go on forever, but all it takes is for their surveillance technology to beat your security implementation a single time before you are fucked, so i dont care if privacy gets ahead sometime in the future if the currently available privacy software wont keep my ass out of prison today it really is only a matter of time before the feds do a massive technical bust of some sort against people using techniques that were considered to be secure very recently.