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It's not just MtGox and bitstamp. Pretty much every other exchange, as well as bitcointalk.org and trackers like bitcoinity are under attack simultaneously. It'
by vader1 13y ago
It's not just MtGox and bitstamp. Pretty much every other exchange, as well as bitcointalk.org and trackers like bitcoinity are under attack simultaneously. It's a pretty obvious attempt at manipulating the market by causing widespread panic, so that the attackers can buy in at a conveniently low price the moment the attack is halted.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoHow can you confirm this?
- gruseom 13y agoA genuine crash in which everyone was trying to sell at once might look like a DDoS. How do you know this is not that? (No opinion, just curious.)
- ashray 13y agoAll bitcoin sites, whether they are forums or exchanges went down. It was a widespread DDOS on pretty much anything bitcoin related. For example: bitcointalk.org was also down.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoThat still does not verify beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a widespread DDoS on "pretty much anything bitcoin related". Can you please explain why such attackers would bother spreading their DDoS volume across such a wide range of sites instead of focusing it on the one site that handles 80% of btc <-> usd conversions?
- ashray 13y agoWhat exactly causes reasonable doubt here ? If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..). The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger than normal volume of trades occurring, it wasn't possible due to the lag on the exchanges. I don't know why all those bitcoin sites were down, but the fact is that the largest bitcoin sites were all down for at least a few minutes each. The intention though was probably to trigger a market reaction to buy in at lower prices. It appears to have worked temporarily.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoThere's actually a huge volume of trades during the dips, at least according to bitcoinity. I still don't understand why they would bother spreading their attack volume across multiple sites. Hitting Mt.Gox with everything they've got offers two potential strategies: - trigger a crash, buy low, stop the attack and watch it go back up - trigger a price drop and profit massively from arbitrage with other exchanges still trading higher(BTC China for example)
- illuminate 13y ago"If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on" This doesn't follow in the event of a run.
- kale 13y agoWouldn't it make sense that everyone is logging onto those forums and comment about the price changes? I would think anything bitcoin related has a high volume today. Including HN.
- pseudonym 13y agoI'm going to vote on the side of "people hitting bitcoin related sites to figure out why the price is dropping so fast", as opposed to an "actual" DDOS. The result, however, amounts to the same thing.
- Torgo 13y agoAt about the same time as mtgox was slammed with a DDOS, Dwolla (which is a common intermediary to get money in and out of mtgox) was too. The timing seems highly suspicious.
- riffraff 13y agojust to keep the discussion going, I'm also going to vote on the side of "people hitting bitcoin related sites to bring money in and out of it", as opposed to an "actual" DDOS.
- ars 13y agoHow do they manage to make the DDOS only target buyers and not sellers? Seems to me a DDOS would just make no bitcoins available for sale, but would not change the price. It doesn't matter if the price is low if they can't actually buy anything.