Re: How long before the price tanks sharply because Silk Road is down?

DoS attacks are really easy against Tor hidden services. The service can't block the attacker because all clients are anonymous. Tor hidden service introduction points can sometimes also be DoS-attacked. I wouldn't use Tor to run a site like this.

Theymos You shocked me! Where You will host Silk Road if not Tor for it to not be found and taken down? Freenet, I2P?

The .onion server cannot block the anonymous traffic, but also the attackers cannot utilize several orders of magnitude superior bandwidth because they are forced to use Tor and nodes have varying speeds. They can set up own nodes and force Tor to connect though them but even then only the guard nodes will be DDoSed.

With clearnet server also the blocking helps only partially. With powerful enough botnet the upstream links will fail. If someone set us up the botnet, we are on our way to destruction

If botnet was used to setup tor nodes. How many would be necessary to locate silkroad server? Is that possible?

Silk Road probably have configured guard nodes and not selected on random. I don't know exactly how many nodes will take to compromise majority of circuits but it will require hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Ant the compromising of Tor by single entity holding majority of relays will help only against clearnet traffic going trough Tor. For hidden services timing attack is still best that can be done. I'm not expert on this maybe someone can explain more on this subject.

Try to guess why the Tor network have become much much faster then it was ever before?

And the SR is up and running as well as SR forums. And no major change in price.