Silk Road forums

I was just wondering if DPR will actually respond? I feel like the community has spoken... both sides are pretty clear. We've weighed out the pros and cons and while we may not have come to an answer amongst all of us its clear that the general view is this rule needs some revision.

Really the only thing we can do now is wait and see if DPR will comment.

So what do I do if I sent a large order in on 5/21 it didn't arrive today and now his page is down and he conivnced me bc I was new to SR and had only 500 transaction spent I had to fe..

Selling a vendor account initially seems absurd, however, I've reflected on this a little and I can actually understand where DPR might be standing on this issue:

Quote from: scout on May 23, 2013, 04:35 am

A vendor account doesn't harm others - an asshole scammer running a vendor account does, but a vendor account itself does nothing to deceive or harm others.

Scout is right here, a vendor account on its own doesn't HARM anyone, it's level of harm depends entirely on the person USING the vendor account. In a similar way, the selling of drugs on Silk Road by itself is completely innocent, but put those drugs in the wrong hands and they could be used to commit serious atrocities. If the selling of a vendor account were to be banned simply because of POTENTIAL danger, then the entirety of Silk Road's values would be undermined.

In terms of WHY people would buy and/or sell vendor accounts; what if a vendor decides to end his run on selling and calls it a day? The benefit of selling a vendor account for him would be that he earns a final bit of cash for all the hard work he's put into the community. The buyer, in return, will be able to get hold of an account for less than the bond normally is (say he gets it for 50% cheaper than normal). The benefit for the buyer in this instance is dependent on his financial circumstances. Start-up vendors generally don't have much capital to play with in the first place to set up their shops, I speak from experience! In being able to get a cheaper vendor account, they give themselves more money to play with in order to get more/higher quality products to sell to the community. Admittedly, they won't get their money back like they would in a bond, but that initial extra cash they had could have made them enough profit to cover the original cost of the vendor account in a shorter time period than normal accounts are expected to wait (6 weeks).

I can accept the concerns that people have over the abuse of trusted vendor accounts, but at the end of the day this is just another reason for all users to stay inside the escrow system at all times to avoid being scammed.

Sorry for going on a bit there, I just thought I'd chime in with my thoughts.