I believe that disabling new vendor registration is very dangerous. It asks for a large amount of trust from the community, and I do not believe it is a level of trust that we should have in the maliciousness or lack thereof of whoever has the controls of Silk Road at any given time. If the site is ever covertly compromised by law enforcement, I imagine that they may turn new vendor registration off. This is because it will completely remove the possibility of new legitimate vendors joining, and as they compromise vendor accounts over time and legitimate vendors retire, they will be able to skew the percentage of law enforcement run vendor accounts largely to their favor over enough time. The fact that Silk Road was open registration is largely what allowed us to be certain it was not a honeypot from the beginning, it allows us to rationalize that if we are allowed to open vendor accounts here then anyone else must be, and if anyone can be a vendor obviously not all of the vendors will be law enforcement. If the site is closed registration from the start, you can not use that same line of reasoning in your assessment of the risk of utilizing the site. I understand that there are some traffic issues with the number of new people joining heavily stressing the server and even the Tor network itself. First of all know that many of the problems people are experiencing are limitations of Tor, its hidden services were not designed for such high traffic loads and number of simultaneously connected users. Improvements to Tor hidden services scaling is constantly being made and if Silk Road is using an out of date version of Tor switching to the latest version will probably significantly help it in scaling to a larger user base. Additionally, there are settings in Torrc that can be modified to help aid with scaling, and also some things you may have in Torrc that could be causing issues. That said, I am not sure if your scaling problems are entirely confined to Tor (but I am certain that you are hitting limitations to Tor hidden service scalability). I am sure that you can afford enough bandwidth and high enough quality dedicated servers to run SR though.