
Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’ - Lightning
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/21/here-we-go-again-top-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-taken-down-for-hours-by-another-strong-ddos-attack/
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foobarqux
The recent repeated abuse of the term DDoS by ignorant members of the bitcoin
community is misleading and confusing.

The first D in DDoS mean "distributed". There has never been any evidence of a
distributed attack.

Server overload from heavy use of an application is not a DoS attack. A 37
transaction per second capacity suggests that MtGox simply cannot handle even
moderate trading activity.

The frequent small trades that the exchange sometimes sees can reasonably be
explained by bots trying to exploit the market in some way and not to attack
availability of the exchange itself.

~~~
Zidewinder
At least some of these incidents appear to be actual DDoS attacks. It's true
that Gox's trading engine sucks and is prone to lag during sudden spikes in
activity, but many of these incidents have shut the whole service down very
abruptly without any preceding increase in trading volume. Not to mention that
they've released at least one Prolexic support ticket:

<http://i.imgur.com/yPLufjj.png>

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KaeseEs
It would be easier (for me at least, but I suspect others as well) to take
Bitcoins seriously if the backbone of the Bitcoin economy weren't the Magic
The Gathering Online Exchange, which apparently is crippled by loads of less
than 40 transactions/sec.

~~~
Zidewinder
It seems a bit fallacious to equate a Dollars-to-Bitcoins exchange with the
Bitcoin currency itself. I know it's easy to forget amid this speculative
frenzy, but conversion into USD is not really Bitcoin's ultimate purpose. None
of these attacks have had any effect on transactions within the Bitcoin
network/economy itself.

~~~
cjh_
Quoting the mtgox homepage which in turn claims to be quoting wikipedia: "As
of July 2011, Mt. Gox handles over 80% of all Bitcoin trade".

MTGOX is more than just a USD to bitcoin exchange.

~~~
Zidewinder
No, actually, it isn't. You're quoting a piece of marketing material for
chrissake. They handle 80% of all Bitcoin TRADE. As in Bitcoin-to-USD-and-
vice-versa trades. Not Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions.

You clearly don't have even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin itself works.
It's a distributed, peer-to-peer system. That statement is analogous to saying
"The Pirate Bay handles over 80% of all Bittorrent traffic." In reality, TPB
handles exactly zero actual torrent traffic, and Gox is in no way involved in
processing actual bitcoin blockchain transactions.

Like TBP, Gox is a convenient target for people trying to disrupt easy entry
into the more robust distributed system that it provides access to. But if you
already have bitcoins and simply wish to spend them, Gox could get sucked into
a blackhole and it wouldn't affect you any more than a raid on TBP affects
your in-progress torrent downloads.

~~~
Zidewinder
Is there a limit on the depth of comments here? I can't seem to reply to
cjh_'s adjacent post. Anyway, he's correct that it's possible to keep all your
coins on a Gox-hosted wallet. I kind of forgot that people actually do that.
It's a really terrible way to store your coins, even if you use a more
stable/trustworthy service than theirs.

There are much better ways to utilize the convenience of a web wallet without
handing all your coins over to some sketchy website, such as blockchain.info's
wallet system.

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runn1ng
Is (D)Dos on Mt.Gox even a news anymore?

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mikemoka
Is something like a distributed peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange in the works?
Will something like that ever be released?

~~~
pdog
Yeah. Check out Ripple:

<https://ripple.com/>

~~~
scoot
How the heck did they get a 2-sylable 6-character dictionary word .com domain
for this?!

~~~
clarkm
They bought it from a Grateful Dead fan for something like $10k.

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joshmlewis
I'm not usually a conspirator, but what if the US government or another
government that didn't want something like bitcoin getting any bigger, was
behind this? If this keeps happenings it will diminish the "brand" enough to
always make people really cautious. Thoughts? Shooting from the hip here. :)

~~~
eof
I have thought this as well. The fact that a bunch of exchanges all went down
simulatenously and /r/bitcoin had a super-rare non-circle-jerky top-post
(calling the bubble bursting), by a brand new member, gave me the impression
that there was a coordinated attack going on. TBH, my first thoughts were more
of a trading cartel trying to get in cheaper; but government was a possibility
as well.

That being said,.. who knows? Certainly can't prove that's the case or even
make a good argument for it (although, I do think a good argument could be
made that _something_ fishy was going on.

~~~
shubb
If a major state wanted to 'do something' about a website, to the extent that
they were happy to break the law, I don't think it would look like this.

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the_cat_kittles
Who stands to gain from repeatedly DDoSing Mt. Gox?

~~~
pemulis
The two most obvious culprits would be:

1) People trying to make the price of bitcoins drop, so that they can buy low
and sell high. (This possibility is called out in the article.)

2\. Criminals trying to extract a ransom from Mt. Gox, which is losing a lot
of revenue and trust every minute their site is down.

~~~
rubinelli
I think (2) is more likely at this point. There's only so much a market will
take before it tanks and stays down for months. This kind of market (along
with porn and gambling) is a great target for botnet controllers trying to
make a buck.

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drivebyacct2
People here need to stuff it and read more before running on about Bitcoin -
I've seen more biased, uninformed, telephone-word-of-mouth mutilated
information, etc. And ironically, some are even running their mouths while
accusing others of doing it. Mt.Gox has been being DDoSd , not just from
transaction volume (due to their poor trading engine), transaction spam (a
"fun" point of contention among people) and from other SYN/UDP flooding.

Everytime, until two days ago, each DDOS correlated in a massive drop off in
price - including the air-releasing drop from 260 to 60 back to 120. Two days
ago, the attacker lost money, and today, at least as of now and the price it
was last night, the price seems to reflect the truth: sadly, mt.gox is a
cornerstone right now (not for long) and mt.gox being DDOSd doesn't mean the
immediate impending end of Bitcoin.

