UPDATE Jan 17: It's been two and a half weeks since our stressful Christmas incident. The pending wallet system was developed, deployed, then refunded. This caused a huge spike in traffic as the word spread that we are a trustworthy staff. Unfortunately this resulted in a very slow market, near-downtime, and postponed new features while developer time was focused on keeping everything running.
We are going to try something new. For the next thirty days, we will not be communicating exact release dates for anything past the next immediate release. We will keep a public list of the priorities we can safely disclose, and we will post Planned Maintenance notices before launching the completed new features.
When you hear an exact launch date communicated from us, know that our underlying tone will always be "this is when we hope to launch it, if nothing more urgent appears". Unfortunately the past two weeks' target launch dates have been missed due to several very unexpected urgent tasks appearing:
1. DPR2 returning cold storage, while great news, required many dev hours to unwind the "Pending Wallet" system safely and refund the correct people, while still maintaining escrow order status.
2. Site Unresponsiveness - unresolved this would have turned into downtime. The fast page load times you're seeing now are due to us dropping everything to work on investigating this issue and making the appropriate upgrades.
3. Slow Deposits and Withdrawals - unresolved, the delay times would have only continued to increase rapidly. That was obviously not acceptable. Redesigning our accounting architecture to be more robust took more developer hours than anything else on this list, but it made you stop calling us terrible things.
4. Patching Possible Vulnerabilities - None were successfully exploited, we discovered them ourselves and patched them quickly.
5. BTC Conversion Rates Inaccurate - our system uses a weighted average based on several top exchanges. Unfortunately one of those top exchanges started returning very inaccurate values, causing our approach to fail and get "stuck". Rewriting this safely in parallel with #2 and #3 above took more time than it should have, but the site remained online.
As of today, Jan 17, there are no known bugs or performance issues which are more pressing than getting the staff's Support platform and the community's Dispute Resolution platform online.
From my perspective I trust that the dev team will be ready soon with both of these, but we will always drop what we are doing if a more urgent issue appears or if downtime is imminent due to performance degradation. Keeping this market secure from hackers/LE, and keeping this market online are our top goals.
Support issues are taking much longer to resolve than our team is content with. We have a massive backlog and are doing our best to work through it, while also hiring more behind-the-scenes staff to assist. This will take time to improve, but we have a concrete plan for resolving these issues very quickly and we will be posting about it shortly.
To the loyal among you who speak positively despite the hard times: you make a massive impact our morale. Thank you.
SR1 was not built in a day. SR2 is three months in. We are very excited about what month four is bringing.
For transparency's sake, here's a TL;DR of the action plan recently communicated to our Development Team:
1. Ignore demoralizing forum posts and keep your head down, work.
2. Drop all other tasks if you notice a vulnerability or server downtime. Security+Uptime over all else.
3. Get support system implemented and moving fast, give staff rigidly-audited access to key market admin tools
4. Re-enable Auto-Finalize intelligently, launch Dispute Resolution platform
5. Get outstanding disputes resolved fast with the new support system
6. Work towards finishing in-progress features from the list below
If the server infrastructure continues to stay stable after this week's improvements, expect new features to be implemented much quicker than the past two weeks.
We will be updating the rollout schedule with a more accurate outlook and retiring this thread soon. Do not reference anything below this line as being the latest source of truth.
UPDATE Jan 15: It's been an onslaught of resolving urgent issues as the marketplace's traffic has doubled. Thankfully the market is online, and bitcoins are flowing much faster after these hotfixes. Unfortuately, it's resulted in these feature releases being delayed. Staff is meeting today to decide more realistic launch dates, expect an update within 24hr.
UPDATE Jan 10: The development team has been spending a lot of time troubleshooting the transaction delays. Staff has also been battling illness. Releases will be delayed as the problem continues to be reviewed.
UPDATE Jan 5: Fixing yesterday's withdrawal delays sank a lot of the developers' time. Expect delays with this release, likely in the 12-24hrs range.
IMPORTANT: In case you do not read the itemized items below, as of Jan 5th 2014, all order addresses will require PGP encryption! You will not be able to place an order if you do not know how to use PGP. Wake up and start being safe!
Auto-finalization is disabled until the Dispute Center opens. Details on the new auto-finalize process will be released then as well.
This is a huge week for our marketplace, ringing in a fresh new year for our movement.
As you have learned by now (perhaps too well), we never rush new features to market. Security comes first. New features are undergoing security tests to ensure there are no vulnerabilities. As they are hardened, they will be rolled out on this schedule unless major problems are found.
Rollout schedule:
Dec 28th at 23:45:00 UTC - Released!
Open Vendor Registration
New Vendors can now pay bonds through the marketplace, there is no longer a need to message a staff member.
Old messages have been purged
As per the Security Precautions thread. If you notice messages missing, that is because we place your security above all else.
Users can now delete messages and threads
Each message has a delete link. Each thread has a "Delete all contained messages" link. When both users in a conversation delete all of the messages inside of it, the entire thread is deleted. Until then, deleted messages display with a content of "(deleted)"
Simple Bitcoin Mixer
We have implemented a basic bitcoin mixer which will be constantly rotating user balances and escrow balances. Do not trust this as your primary mixer. Never completely trust a darknet marketplace. Work will continue on making this more advanced, having it peer-reviewed, and eventually a separate product.
Vendors can post Stealth Listings
This should eventually replace the cluttered Custom Orders category. A vendor can create a listing which is only accessible by a custom link. The vendor can share this link at will.
Vendors can enter Vacation Mode
Temporarily disables all listings without deleting them.
Upcoming Release #1
(Delayed due to fixing withdrawal problems, preventing a riot)
Opt-out of Escrow with No-Escrow Listings
Don't want to use the escrow system? You don't have to.
Bulk Reply to Messages
Vendors, this one goes out to you.
Option to mandate PGP for inbound messages
If you enable this, all users sending you messages will be required to encrypt their messages.
Launch of new Support System
Too much to explain here, but it is incredible and almost complete. This will allow us to respond much quicker, we realize that support turnaround time has been a huge pain point.
Upcoming Release #2
Address Field will require PGP Encryption
This will force our community to be responsible. If it hurts sales in the short term but teaches buyers how to be safe - that's fine with me.
Users can transfer BTC Between accounts
Direct account-to-account transfers with no fees, outside of escrow. PGP authentication is required for this.
Upcoming Release #3
Dispute Resolution Center
Too much to explain, this will get its own post. This has been in testing for weeks, and we are thrilled to release it to the community.
Buyer Stats Page
Vendors can now view buyer stats
Buyer Feedback
Vendors can now update buyers' feedback, just as buyers leave feedback for Vendors.
It's a big week for Silk Road, here's to smooth security testing across a Happy New Year.
