How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.
That presumes the adminstrators exist, given that the site's two principals have been arrested. I refer you again to my initial reply: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647659>
> Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.
Maybe I misunderstood. I thought this was referring to the scenario where more administrators did exist and in such a scenario, they could live two blocks away from the FBI headquarters and it wouldn't make a difference.
They require maintainers to continue operating.
Bills must be paid.
At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed.
There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex:
<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>
I'm ... disappointed that it seems necessary to point this out explicitly.