here we go again… The powers that be have take down some evil doers hiding behind TOR. I’m must ask pardon for being a bit jaundiced about the hole thing.
Clearly there are people doing undesirable things taking advantage of the protection offered by TOR. but TOR has a legitimate purpose and the support behind TOR is impeccable. But TOR is not perfect, specifically it is not fool proof. User error compromises it.
But I’m wondering is there is another way for the vendors on Silk Road to conduct their business. Leaving aside the problems of payment for the moment: BitCoin has it’s own weaknesses.
Concentrating merely on how two parties can get in touch with each other. Were A is looking for something that B has to offer, put very generically.

If my understanding of the attack against Silk Road is correct: It is based on having control over a significant portion of the onion routers. Sufficient for being able to establish a pattern of traffic from yourself to a particular .onion address.
Each request packet is routed every which way by the TOR protocol. But with control of enough routing nodes a pattern will never the less emerge since the request packets must eventually end up in the same place: Where the concealed service is hosted.
This last bit is true even without implementation errors. DNS leakage and the like.
What if the hidden service is not hosted in just one particular server, but on many different ones. And using the service will involve traffic to many different locations. Is this possible and whould it make a service concealed behing a onion routing scheme undetectable ?
That depends. If the hidden service is hosted on a fixed set of servers rather than just one, there is no real difference. Just that more traffic now needs to be analysed to be able to pin-point them. This could be counteracted by moving the service often, but that is a defence mechanism independent of how many host the hidden service is using. And controlling more onion routers will help the tracker.

Trusted VPNs is of course an option. Where both the client and the hidden service use VPN to tunnel to some part of the internet. The tracker is then left with finding a proxy rather than the real host. It is still possible that the tracker might use traffic analysis to get from the proxy to the real host. As long as the service stays put long enough.

This suggests a possible course of action. Can the hidden service be dynamically located ? Perhaps even randomly.
I think I’ll work on that. A facinating challenge. Watch this space.