I think that we as a community should retire the Silk Road name.
Silk Road had it's run. It was the first anonymous internet marketplace that utilized Tor and Bitcoin. It was very successful for a period of time. But it was plagued with misfortune, notably some major hacks/thefts and ultimately two FBI seizures.
I don't think the Silk Road name will ever recover. Right now, the only people who would use the Silk Road name are incompetent admins looking to prey on incompetent users. I don't think anyone with any technical expertise would work under the Silk Road name knowing that the FBI has seized it twice. And any experienced user knows not to trust any new Silk Road run by some internet randos.
Silk Road has died and I think we should make that official. No trust should be given to anyone claiming to use the name.
May the Silk Road idea live forever.
tl;dr: We should keep the Silk Road idea alive, but we should not use the Silk Road name anymore.
No. Its like thepiratebay. Its the biggest name that everybody knows about, and so it is frequently attacked my law enforcement to try and influence the public into thinking that piracy will be stopped. By constantly returning, thepiratebay serves two functions:
The same thing is going to be true of silk road. It doesn't matter about the code base, or who is running it. Its all about a public image. Its a scapegoat. As these markets make the news more and more, people go out in search of them more and more.
The amount of publicly available drug markets has exploded since the first silk road went down. Media exposure grows the illicit market, and if people see that "they can't stop the silk road" they'll start viewing it the same way they view thepiratebay. Growth will increase, it will become commonplace, and it will only get harder to tackle the problem.