[dylandrop]

Anonymity is definitely a big problem, but there's something to be said for a network that doesn't have a central authority. I don't think the problem with Silk Road was the anonymity, it was more the fact that it was a central authority - once that was taken down, the whole system stopped. As the article says, it's very difficult for the feds to take down a network like this if there's a ton of people using it.

[ixmatus]

Right, but distributed systems are solved problem at this point, anonymity is much harder, and GNUnet's primary model is distributed / mesh darknets as a foundation for some of their anonymity features.