Quote from: pine on May 01, 2012, 08:20 pmYou guys must have short memories if you don't remember what happened with OVDB. SR is a relatively centralized institution. You won't be so lazare faire if all the hidden services you currently use evaporate overnight. SR gets turned off for an hour, and this board gets flooded with panicking buyers every time. This is a global business not a cottage industry, you can't just pop out for a coffee break and a smoke, the service has to flow 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year.Remember how it feels when the electricity goes in a black-out? All previous assumptions are rendered invalid. You have to visit a shop just to buy water because your pump doesn't work. And you feel stupid for not having candles or matches etc, until the lights come back on and you promptly forget the inconvenience. You didn't get smarter because the lights came on. You just got more confident.The point is that if there was a highly decentralized method of the entire network anonymously communicating with itself without using SR as a intermediary, then that would be a good thing. It gives flexibility, redundancy. It would make bouncing back from an attack instantaneous. Sure it'd happen anyway, but why have a disruption in service?The key thing is to make it so that even if LE 'intercepted' messages or was a member of that network, that it would be completely irrelevant.Making a list of clearweb contact details is stupid, yes. But the problem is real even if the solution purposed was crap. Why do you think Speak Easy is being built? Instead of pointing fingers, try to come up with some interim ideas to fix the problem. Something that isn't obviously dependent on a single set of DOSable servers somewhere.Forgive me Pine but my technical knowledge isn't as profound as yours but isn't the essence of a Tor hidden service that it is already decentralised and cannot be taken down? Also isn't the contact information of buyers/sellers already duplicated in essence by people having separate accounts here on the Forum?I imagine if SR was taken down for any reason, a new site would be set up and the address for it would be posted across every major message board so that people could get back in touch - I also imagine the site's creators keep regular back ups in case this happens to restore people's account details - do we really need to do anything above and beyond this? I'm not picking holes in what you've said, I'm genuinely curious.V.