I know what you're thinking. All the alphabay links are down, there's no word from any staff, someone posted a large bitcoin transaction and people are yelling things about australian medicare and exit scam. And here you are refreshing various subreddits every 5 mins hoping for an update.
But let's be rational about this. All the alphabay links being down is exactly what happens when the staff take the site down to do work on it. Even the forums are usually down during this process, though it has at times been put up prior to the rest of the site, (usually to quell the rumors people post here). And there's not nearly as much commenting or activity on here as during previous downtimes, which I assume relates to the following fact:
It was the 4th of July in America. I don't know much about the US, but I assume that day is a public holiday, with banks and the post being closed. As such, the day on which the least Americans would be using the website. And since NA is the largest market for AB, wouldn't it make sense to do maintenance precisely during this period?
I suspect that the bulk of the English speaking staff at AB are also located in North America, so it stands to reason that they might not be around right now to provide updates. And let's face it - AB has always been terrible at providing updates during periods of down time.
Then there's the whole Australian Medicare thing to consider. Firstly, none of the news reports mention alphabay specifically. And neither of the two news segments I watched yesterday showed alphabay either, even in a blurred form. The news articles themselves mention that a) Medicare numbers have been leaked, and b) that a user has sold a total of 70 at a price of about $35 each on the darknet.
So a user sells a very small amount of people's details for a very small price, and somehow people are convincing themselves that the following happened at AFP headquarters:
"AFP officer: Well, this alphabay site has helped move a measly few hundred tones of coke, heroin, mdma and other substances to a measly few hundred thousand users worldwide...no biggie, not like the FBI or NSA or interpol or anyone really gave a fuck. But by golly, seventy Australians just had their identity stolen for a whopping $35 dollars! Time to get serious!" presses the "take down hidden darknet market" button, which works on any site in less than 5 hours.
To me, that makes absolutely no sense. The site already sold passports, credit card numbers, drivers licenses etc in the thousands - why would a user selling a small amount of medicare cards really be the thing authorities used to take down the site when the rest of the offerings are equally bad or worse, legally wise?
And lastly there's that bitcoin transaction. Yes, it's large, and yes, it looks suspicious. But until someone can actually confirm that it's linked to AB, it's really just that - a large bitcoin transaction. The timing, admittedly, does fit. But there's still other explanations - like the fact that a massive ransomware attack just took place in the previous days, which specifically used bitcoins for the ransom, and was known to affect a huge amount of people.
So I'm going to remain calm for now and hope for the best, until some undeniable proof is presented. There's too many alternate explanations for the current behavior (not to mention the Zcash update meant to be occurring around now, nor the fact that they've been updating functionality regularly over the past few months which seems pointless if they planned to pull the plug). People have always screamed exit scam in the past, and they've always been wrong.
And I really hope this turns out the same.