So earlier I posted this thread where I suspected a DDOS attack:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/305bfl/is_tor_network_under_attack/
and it turned out that there is indeed a DDOS attack. According to speculation of a newspaper article,
The forensic interest in quite how international cybercrime initiative 'Operation Onymous' defied Tor's obfuscating protocols to expose hundreds of 'dark net' sites, including infamous online drug warehouse Silk Road 2.0, has led many to conclude that the core approach to deanonymisation of Tor clients depends upon becoming a 'relay of choice' - and a default resource when Tor-directed DDOS attacks put 'amateur' servers out of service."
If Blankbank is still up, it may be that the feds are DDOSing all other services other than Blankbank to allow the feds to find Blackbank's IP and take them out. They're probably going to do this one by one to each hidden service because Evo's exit means that hidden service traffic is far more bottlenecked and concentrated. I don't think it is FUD to suggest that people approach markets with caution at the moment and prepare for the worst at all times. Please don't buy/sell goods on debt. Markets are inherently unstable and shit goes down really often, so please be careful.
LIGHTING THE GWERNSIGNAL /u/gwern
Do you believe that there's any way to protect against the DDOS to identify server attack mentioned above? Also how was evo able to maintain such perfect uptime? Finally, do you believe that onymous was merely through locating sketchy server hosts and taking everything down or an actual sophisticated Tor attack like the one mentioned above?
everyone flash the /u/gwern signal