9 ms·

It was not a DDoS: MtGox got 20k new accounts per day

124 points by speeder 14y ago

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Someone, please, compete with Mt.Gox more. :( Also, don't store your wallets on Mt.Gox. Oh what a target they must be.
- Jach 14y ago
  In general I agree with the advice to not store large quantities of btc on Mt. Gox, but it's not as dangerous as it used to be a year ago and may be less dangerous than storing them locally in an encrypted wallet... Especially if one uses Windows. If one is using two-factor authentication with Mt. Gox, even if I somehow got infected with a keylogger it wouldn't really matter for Mt. Gox whereas my local wallet would be in trouble. And while we'll see how Mt. Gox responds to user stupidity that leads to their btc being stolen, I'm confident that if it was squarely Mt. Gox's fault (e.g. someone executed a successful social engineering attack on them to get around yubikey), they would make things right.
quandryfoe 14y ago
http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png
- redthrowaway 14y ago
  There's definitely a great deal of automated trading happening. I suspect it's less DDoS than ad-hoc HFT bots, though.
  - aantthony 14y ago
    I think these are done in bursts specifically to cause lag. Nobody would bother to buy 0.1 BTC in 100 separate orders at the same price. Often the orders are cancelled anyway.
    - r-cid 14y ago
      Actually, I believe this is bitcoin washing. Its money laundering of sorts.
      - hkmurakami 14y ago
        Won't you get destroyed in fees doing this?
        consz 14y ago
        Which is more, paying x% on 1BTC of x% a hundred times on 0.01BTC?
        niggler 14y ago
        I'm not familiar with the cost structure, but if there were a per-transaction cost then it would be: which is more, paying x% + y once on 1 BTC or paying x% + y a hundred times on 0.01 BTC? Clearly the latter is more, assuming of course that `y` is positive (and it would be a very strange market that inverted the structure)
        oscilloscope 14y ago
        On Bitfloor, you actually get up to 0.1% rebate on limit orders. From the docs: "Any order that is on the order book will receive a rebate when filled. Think of this as a negative fee (you actually get extra funds). This is done to provide an incentive for some traders to place their orders onto the order book for others to better understand market conditions."
        niggler 14y ago
        Same thing happens on the equity markets, with the difference being pocketed by the exchanges (they'll pay .29 cents per share to liquidity providers and charge .30 to liquidity takers)
        14y ago
- danjumasule 14y ago
  Dear quandryfoe My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 9830422.33333421 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance. It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics. Regards, Danjuma Sule
  - chm 14y ago
    Why is your name in green?
    - Mz 14y ago
      "Noob" Edit: I mean green equals new account.
    - gojomo 14y ago
      It's an 'HN Verified' account; this person has passed all identity/credit checks and may -- nay, should -- be issued convertible debt at will.
      - sgdesign 14y ago
        How can I get one of these "HN Verified" accounts? Are you the person in charge of verification I should be sending my credit card information to?
        MacsHeadroom 14y ago
        From the same place you get 4chan gold accounts.
        14y ago
mrb 14y ago
For comparison, Facebook acquired their first 100M users at an average rate of 60k accounts per day.
- waratuman 14y ago
  Facebook users generally don't intend to transact though.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    Especially not in a way where the exact order of each transaction is critical, so there is no opportunity for any parallelism.
    - anonymoushn 14y ago
      So while this is an astute observation, a properly run exchange would go through a lot of effort to separate the matching engine (the inherently single-threaded part of the exchange) from the portions of the system that accept orders and spew data. The registration system and web site also don't belong anywhere they could possibly contend with the matching engine. Real exchanges process orders of magnitude more volume on a single symbol than mtgox does, yet have latencies measured in microseconds rather than tens of minutes.
      - krunaldo 14y ago
        The matching engine should be separated completely from the rest of system as this is the one component where you want to align with cpu cache and all other kind of crazy low level optimizations. I do agree that mtgox system is slow but we should keep in mind the resource difference both in time and money the large stock exchanges have had time to build their systems. Most of the stock exchanges also don't build their own system but rely on buying one from a independent organization or another stock exchange. A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol.
salman89 14y ago
1) They should put a captcha on their sign up form. Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by 10x (60k in March alone to 20k per day) 2) "The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs." But how much has the volume changed? Is there a way of somehow filtering out what would be "panic" induced trading (perhaps by removing # trades that happen in a large swing) to see if trade frequency has changed?
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Volume really jumped up - eyeballing it, conservatively, about $15mm in the last 24 hours of trading volume: http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/widget/chart/ http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/widget/chart/
- Joeboy 14y ago
  > Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by 10x I don't know, well publicised offers of free money might actually result in quite high uptake.
watercup 14y ago
Real Life Mario Brothers?
InclinedPlane 14y ago
If someone did a little bit of analysis on MtGox they might have concluded that setting up new accounts was the most effective way to do a DoS attack. Not that I'm saying that's what happened, just that it seems naive to say "we were down due to new account creation, and therefore we should rule out the possibility of a DoS attack!"
- mrb 14y ago
  The MtGox employees talk about 10 Gbps of traffic hitting their front-end servers. They are desperately working with Black Lotus and Prolexic to help. That is a textbook network DDoS. "Creation of the accounts" is not the source of the slowness and unresponsiveness of the site. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#msg1737375 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...
  - Igalze 14y ago
    They are already using prolexic (check DNS to verify) and it sure looks like DDoS to me.
  - NewAccnt 14y ago
    But saying that's what it was is a great way to keep the bubble going.
Karunamon 14y ago
Okay, not a DDoS. Let's go with that for a sec. Absurd load? Even when the data feeds are working, they show huge bursts of transactions going through. (A link downthread shows a screen full of tiny transactions being executed) MtGox is synonymous with 'bitcoin' at this point. Everyone who knows what a bitcoin is knows what that site is. Are all those 20k accounts legitimate?
- ghshephard 14y ago
  To be clear - latency on transactions was at around 600 seconds in the middle of the day - that is, an order to "buy" at the market, or "sell" at the market, took 600+ seconds to execute. For about 20 minutes, they buy/sell buttons were non-responsive. You could click on them - but nothing happened. I have a suspicion (without evidence other than observation) that at one point today the buy/sell functions were disabled.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    More like 3600 seconds for over an hour. The buy/sell buttons always worked, as far as I know, but when the lag is an hour I can see how it would seem broken.
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      I experienced two failure scenarios today - they were very different. Failure Scenario #1 - Buy/Sell Buttons were not working. You would click them - but absolutely nothing was happening. On #MtGoxLive there were a number of us all experiencing exactly the same thing. A few believed it might have been a javascript issue. Failure Scenario #2 - Once the buttons were activated/fixed - your order was placed in queue instantly, but remained "pending" - on #mtgoxlive, ;;goxlag showed lag time of about 600 seconds - My order went from pending to "executed" exactly according to ;;goxlag.
      - carbocation 14y ago
        I consider the first a bug, but the second seems to be the system failing in the way it was designed to.
GigabyteCoin 14y ago
I find this hard to believe... mtgox, bitcointalk, bitcoincharts were all just experiencing "too much traffic" today? bitcointalk has a massive donations budget, and we all know mtgox has a lot of money and a huge interest in preventing something like this from happening. I think it was a DDoS combined with a few opportune sells to create a panic on purpose to be quite honest. Tinfoil hat replies welcome.
- mrb 14y ago
  Theymos (main bitcointalk admin) is seeing very high traffic to the forums: 250 requests per second. He thinks this is legit traffic, not a DDoS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#msg1799471 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#ms...
  - GigabyteCoin 14y ago
    Then what is the reason for the mass panic/selling?
    - mrb 14y ago
      Mtgox the exchange (not Bitcointalk the forum) is under DDoS which caused the panic selling.
    - Helianthus 14y ago
      The crushing inevitability of Bitcoin's failure?
    - bnr 14y ago
      It briefly crossed the 200€ mark yesterday. Maybe a lot of people wanted to cash out at that point. As soon as the price was dropping, more people decided it was a good time to sell.
      - IanCal 14y ago
        While it was dropping, there were two ways you could expect it to go. Either it was dropping and was going to stay low, in which case you should sell, or it would rise back up in which case you should sell and then buy when it got cheap.
fatbat 14y ago
Considering how volatile bitcoins are, any downtime DDoS or not, affect users a great deal. Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. I wonder how their stack is setup. Anyone from MtGox?
- thejosh 14y ago
  Well when everyone only trades through one website this is what happens.
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    I trade at another exchange that's inside the SEPA zone, has a 6x lower fee, and doesn't require ridiculous amounts of papers to verify yourself (which is illegal to request without a permit from the Dutch CBP, but I can hardly object because then I simply can't transfer fiat currency out of gox). The trading lag was also much lower there.
    - fatbat 14y ago
      But are the other markets as rabid as MtGox? I think that is why alot of people even put up with the higher fees. Also when MtGox comes back online in ~3 hours I believe we will be in for some more bot action manipulation, especially with the temporary fee waive now.
- ycombobreaker 14y ago
  > Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. You are trivializing the real markets. What makes you think this is something that NASDAQ can just "do"? They had a system problem causing delays on Facebook's IPO, and they're still dealing with the shit-storm from that now. Everyone who had poor executions (or missed executions) as a result of the delay is trying to get compensation from the exchange for their technical problem. I haven't checked the exact number recently, but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs". Because bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in the same fashion as stock exchanges, I doubt that MtGox will be on the hook for anyone's poor executions. > I wonder how their stack is setup. As someone else pointed out, their stack is setup wrong if account management has _any_ impact on their matching engine. Hopefully, it was just the web servers which host both accounts-management and trading UIs. Regardless, there was clearly some resource-sharing which should not have happened.
lucb1e 14y ago
I never thought it was a DDoS, can't understand why people think this. Lots of exchanges have been down, one even seemed hacked (turned only a related service was hacked), and meanwhile the price only went up. The price drop is due to panic selling and lag. It was almost inevitable, also constant in the news. Now it happened and we can move on. The price is back to about 75% of what it was already, and I don't think it'll take more than a few months to break the previous price record. Or seeing how fast it's recovering, perhaps not more than a few days.
- BrokenPipe 14y ago
  There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and you can find so on the mtgox website news section. However it was not a DDoS in the classical sense that brought mtgox down to its knees but nonetheless a DDoS has occured. mtgox supports a weird feature whereby you're allowed to enter any buy or sell order even if you don't have funds. This means that whenever the prices matches your order the system needs to check whether you actually can with your balance fill that position. Via the api, it is possible to put tiny transaction even smaller amounts than what you're allowed via the webgui. It doesn't take much review of the ask and bid to find out that there were a huge a mount of micro tiny transactions all over the place. Those are in an ever higher volume when system begins lagging furiously and people panic. These are perhaps HFT, or maybe not, but those are the source of the lag and therefore the source of the panic. This is DDoSing and it's also mtgox fault for having a a toy exchange and us bitcoiners for using it. I long ago moved to bitstamp. You can find your local exchange i'm sure.
ck2 14y ago
Did anyone notice there was a SEVEN MILLION (USD $) transaction yesterday? http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91... Actually, $7M based on $100 value. If it was @ $200, well $14 Million USD.
- weareconvo 14y ago
  Maybe some bitcoins being shuffled around in the exchange?
dgreensp 14y ago
I moved all my bitcoins over to BitStamp (https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/) earlier today. MtGox has always felt a little unreliable at multiple levels. They sound earnest in their post mortems, but it's hard to tell if they are sufficiently competent with web technology to be doing what they're doing.
- BrokenPipe 14y ago
  you did very well. mtgox doesn't deserve to the first and probably not even the second largest exchange.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  I moved to Bitcoin-24 (https://bitcoin-24.com/ https://bitcoin-24.com/ - mainly EUR), they seem pretty popular and have no fees for trading.
- tomp 14y ago
  Bitstamp is no better. If anything, the (comparatively) low trade volume makes it very dangerous. Yesterday, I put in an instant (market) order at about 5pm. It was fulfilled in about 2 hours, for $50 dollars less than the price was when I put it in. I would expect for market orders to be either fulfilled or canceled immediately, not linger pending for 2 hours.
  - SEMW 14y ago
    Market orders are relisted every ~10mins at the market price until fulfilled. If you want to sell at no less than some $X, that's what limit orders are for. You used a market order when what you wanted was a limit order; that's not Bitstamp's fault (unless the fault is in making it clear what the difference is, but IIRC they do explain in the FAQ).
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago
  Bitstamp was down for a large portion of the crash yesterday as well.
tlrobinson 14y ago
Bitcoin needs a high performance, extremely secure, open source trading engine, with a standardized API that traders can use to arbitrage the exchanges. The tricky part is transferring other currencies in and out, and between the exchanges. "Ripple" also sounds promising for this purpose.
- msgilligan 14y ago
  There's nothing like that already? When you say "need" do you know it doesn't exist already? I'm genuinely curious and hoping you know the answer.
  - tlrobinson 14y ago
    There was one called Intersago but it looks defunct: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-open-source-bitcoin-exchange http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-... I came across this project on bitcointalk, which isn't really an exchange but looks interesting: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions
laichzeit0 14y ago
Magic The Gathering Online eXchange (MtGOX) refitted to trade a virtual currency which then had to scale massively in a short period of time. Yeah, I'd say there are serious architectural problems. This is not a software "design" problem though, it's the inevitable real-world result of software "evolution". It happens. I read they're working on a new platform built from scratch. I bet it's going to kick ass as they've got some real world experience now about what works, what does not and what needs to be hardened.
brador 14y ago
If you want to run a succesful pyramid scheme, step 1 is find desparate poor people, reddit is a great starting point. Ring up their greed impulse and the rest writes itself.
- illuminate 14y ago
  The hundreds of thousands of dollars people funnel at a time to 419 schemes indicate that there are plenty of desperate, greed-clouded middle-classed persons and higher-classed suckers. I suppose Pyramids/MLMs also work well among the lower classes, but they're hardly limited to them, diversify!
weazl 14y ago
I've been waiting for over a week to get my account verified so I can start using my account (I'm not in the US), but they only seem to verify a few hundred a day and there are still 5000 people ahead of me.. quite frustrating.
- apapli 14y ago
  I'm in Australia, it was 4 working days. IIRC The price went up from $60 to about $170 during that time, very frustrating. At least I'm verified now - but I have to say their lag time and apparent saling issues still concern me a lot.
edandersen 14y ago
It looks like whoever was behind recent events saw this as message claiming it wasn't a DDoS, chuckled and responded by... making a stronger DDoS. MtGOX is down.
- Judson 14y ago
  The press release did say that they may take the exchange down for a few hours. I'm not sure if that meant unannounced downtime like this though.
Mahn 14y ago
It's amazing how what is currently the largest Bitcoin exchange service can be so unprofessional. You would think they could have anticipated this.
num3ric 14y ago
The NPR Planet Money podcast just released a podcast Tuesday on Bitcoins: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-450-bitcoin-goes-to-the-moon http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-... It was the first time I had heard about Bitcoins, and so did many I think!
downandout 14y ago
There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users. Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be at the center of something as important as Bitcoin? These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies, many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.
- makira 14y ago
  "The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them." There is a big demand, I don't understand why VCs or YCombinator are not pushing a few startups in this direction.
  - r4vik 14y ago
    see https://coinbase.com/ https://coinbase.com/
    - makira 14y ago
      I know about coinbase and use it, but it's very limited. U.S. only, is not a real exchange (buying bitcoins is often not possible), etc. And quite frankly, support is lacking too. Buying bitcoins is still extremely complex for most of the world. It needs to be simplified further.
    - carbocation 14y ago
      Coinbase is probably in it for the long run, and they are probably doing things to enable them to outlast the competition. However. On Monday I was planning to place an order for bitcoin on Coinbase and I was informed that the order would go through on Friday at the market rate at that time. That is somewhat worthless and extremely dangerous in a volatile market. For now, I consider their service unusable.
eli 14y ago
I'm impressed by how many commenters know the cause of someone else's infrastructure problems with such certainty.
- mattacular 14y ago
  Are you new to technology? This is the norm. Everybody is the smartest person in the room, regardless of how little they know about the details of the implementation.
- olh 14y ago
  Déjà vu.
eric970 14y ago
And now, guess what MtGox advises everybody do? Go drink some Champaign! To celebrate their massive success! I'm not kidding-- look at their latest bulletin on why they're suspending trading for the rest of today. You've got to be KIDDING ME. They don't seem to give two shits about their users or their money.

124 points by speeder 14y ago

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Someone, please, compete with Mt.Gox more. :( Also, don't store your wallets on Mt.Gox. Oh what a target they must be.

Jach 14y ago
In general I agree with the advice to not store large quantities of btc on Mt. Gox, but it's not as dangerous as it used to be a year ago and may be less dangerous than storing them locally in an encrypted wallet... Especially if one uses Windows. If one is using two-factor authentication with Mt. Gox, even if I somehow got infected with a keylogger it wouldn't really matter for Mt. Gox whereas my local wallet would be in trouble. And while we'll see how Mt. Gox responds to user stupidity that leads to their btc being stolen, I'm confident that if it was squarely Mt. Gox's fault (e.g. someone executed a successful social engineering attack on them to get around yubikey), they would make things right.

quandryfoe 14y ago

http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png

redthrowaway 14y ago
There's definitely a great deal of automated trading happening. I suspect it's less DDoS than ad-hoc HFT bots, though.
- aantthony 14y ago
  I think these are done in bursts specifically to cause lag. Nobody would bother to buy 0.1 BTC in 100 separate orders at the same price. Often the orders are cancelled anyway.
  - r-cid 14y ago
    Actually, I believe this is bitcoin washing. Its money laundering of sorts.
    - hkmurakami 14y ago
      Won't you get destroyed in fees doing this?
      - consz 14y ago
        Which is more, paying x% on 1BTC of x% a hundred times on 0.01BTC?
        niggler 14y ago
        I'm not familiar with the cost structure, but if there were a per-transaction cost then it would be: which is more, paying x% + y once on 1 BTC or paying x% + y a hundred times on 0.01 BTC? Clearly the latter is more, assuming of course that `y` is positive (and it would be a very strange market that inverted the structure)
        oscilloscope 14y ago
        On Bitfloor, you actually get up to 0.1% rebate on limit orders. From the docs: "Any order that is on the order book will receive a rebate when filled. Think of this as a negative fee (you actually get extra funds). This is done to provide an incentive for some traders to place their orders onto the order book for others to better understand market conditions."
        niggler 14y ago
        Same thing happens on the equity markets, with the difference being pocketed by the exchanges (they'll pay .29 cents per share to liquidity providers and charge .30 to liquidity takers)
        14y ago
danjumasule 14y ago
Dear quandryfoe My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 9830422.33333421 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance. It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics. Regards, Danjuma Sule
- chm 14y ago
  Why is your name in green?
  - Mz 14y ago
    "Noob" Edit: I mean green equals new account.
  - gojomo 14y ago
    It's an 'HN Verified' account; this person has passed all identity/credit checks and may -- nay, should -- be issued convertible debt at will.
    - sgdesign 14y ago
      How can I get one of these "HN Verified" accounts? Are you the person in charge of verification I should be sending my credit card information to?
      - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
        From the same place you get 4chan gold accounts.
        14y ago

mrb 14y ago

For comparison, Facebook acquired their first 100M users at an average rate of 60k accounts per day.

waratuman 14y ago
Facebook users generally don't intend to transact though.
- carbocation 14y ago
  Especially not in a way where the exact order of each transaction is critical, so there is no opportunity for any parallelism.
  - anonymoushn 14y ago
    So while this is an astute observation, a properly run exchange would go through a lot of effort to separate the matching engine (the inherently single-threaded part of the exchange) from the portions of the system that accept orders and spew data. The registration system and web site also don't belong anywhere they could possibly contend with the matching engine. Real exchanges process orders of magnitude more volume on a single symbol than mtgox does, yet have latencies measured in microseconds rather than tens of minutes.
    - krunaldo 14y ago
      The matching engine should be separated completely from the rest of system as this is the one component where you want to align with cpu cache and all other kind of crazy low level optimizations. I do agree that mtgox system is slow but we should keep in mind the resource difference both in time and money the large stock exchanges have had time to build their systems. Most of the stock exchanges also don't build their own system but rely on buying one from a independent organization or another stock exchange. A small nitpick: Volume is one metric but it does not matter in reality the important part is the amount of transactions on a specific symbol.

salman89 14y ago

1) They should put a captcha on their sign up form. Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by 10x (60k in March alone to 20k per day) 2) "The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs." But how much has the volume changed? Is there a way of somehow filtering out what would be "panic" induced trading (perhaps by removing # trades that happen in a large swing) to see if trade frequency has changed?

ghshephard 14y ago
Volume really jumped up - eyeballing it, conservatively, about $15mm in the last 24 hours of trading volume: http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/widget/chart/ http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/widget/chart/
Joeboy 14y ago
> Bitcoin has gotten significant press in the pass week, but not enough to bump registrations by 10x I don't know, well publicised offers of free money might actually result in quite high uptake.

watercup 14y ago

Real Life Mario Brothers?

InclinedPlane 14y ago

If someone did a little bit of analysis on MtGox they might have concluded that setting up new accounts was the most effective way to do a DoS attack. Not that I'm saying that's what happened, just that it seems naive to say "we were down due to new account creation, and therefore we should rule out the possibility of a DoS attack!"

mrb 14y ago
The MtGox employees talk about 10 Gbps of traffic hitting their front-end servers. They are desperately working with Black Lotus and Prolexic to help. That is a textbook network DDoS. "Creation of the accounts" is not the source of the slowness and unresponsiveness of the site. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#msg1737375 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...
- Igalze 14y ago
  They are already using prolexic (check DNS to verify) and it sure looks like DDoS to me.
- NewAccnt 14y ago
  But saying that's what it was is a great way to keep the bubble going.

Karunamon 14y ago

Okay, not a DDoS. Let's go with that for a sec. Absurd load? Even when the data feeds are working, they show huge bursts of transactions going through. (A link downthread shows a screen full of tiny transactions being executed) MtGox is synonymous with 'bitcoin' at this point. Everyone who knows what a bitcoin is knows what that site is. Are all those 20k accounts legitimate?

ghshephard 14y ago
To be clear - latency on transactions was at around 600 seconds in the middle of the day - that is, an order to "buy" at the market, or "sell" at the market, took 600+ seconds to execute. For about 20 minutes, they buy/sell buttons were non-responsive. You could click on them - but nothing happened. I have a suspicion (without evidence other than observation) that at one point today the buy/sell functions were disabled.
- carbocation 14y ago
  More like 3600 seconds for over an hour. The buy/sell buttons always worked, as far as I know, but when the lag is an hour I can see how it would seem broken.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    I experienced two failure scenarios today - they were very different. Failure Scenario #1 - Buy/Sell Buttons were not working. You would click them - but absolutely nothing was happening. On #MtGoxLive there were a number of us all experiencing exactly the same thing. A few believed it might have been a javascript issue. Failure Scenario #2 - Once the buttons were activated/fixed - your order was placed in queue instantly, but remained "pending" - on #mtgoxlive, ;;goxlag showed lag time of about 600 seconds - My order went from pending to "executed" exactly according to ;;goxlag.
    - carbocation 14y ago
      I consider the first a bug, but the second seems to be the system failing in the way it was designed to.

GigabyteCoin 14y ago

I find this hard to believe... mtgox, bitcointalk, bitcoincharts were all just experiencing "too much traffic" today? bitcointalk has a massive donations budget, and we all know mtgox has a lot of money and a huge interest in preventing something like this from happening. I think it was a DDoS combined with a few opportune sells to create a panic on purpose to be quite honest. Tinfoil hat replies welcome.

mrb 14y ago
Theymos (main bitcointalk admin) is seeing very high traffic to the forums: 250 requests per second. He thinks this is legit traffic, not a DDoS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#msg1799471 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#ms...
- GigabyteCoin 14y ago
  Then what is the reason for the mass panic/selling?
  - mrb 14y ago
    Mtgox the exchange (not Bitcointalk the forum) is under DDoS which caused the panic selling.
  - Helianthus 14y ago
    The crushing inevitability of Bitcoin's failure?
  - bnr 14y ago
    It briefly crossed the 200€ mark yesterday. Maybe a lot of people wanted to cash out at that point. As soon as the price was dropping, more people decided it was a good time to sell.
    - IanCal 14y ago
      While it was dropping, there were two ways you could expect it to go. Either it was dropping and was going to stay low, in which case you should sell, or it would rise back up in which case you should sell and then buy when it got cheap.

fatbat 14y ago

Considering how volatile bitcoins are, any downtime DDoS or not, affect users a great deal. Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. I wonder how their stack is setup. Anyone from MtGox?

thejosh 14y ago
Well when everyone only trades through one website this is what happens.
- lucb1e 14y ago
  I trade at another exchange that's inside the SEPA zone, has a 6x lower fee, and doesn't require ridiculous amounts of papers to verify yourself (which is illegal to request without a permit from the Dutch CBP, but I can hardly object because then I simply can't transfer fiat currency out of gox). The trading lag was also much lower there.
  - fatbat 14y ago
    But are the other markets as rabid as MtGox? I think that is why alot of people even put up with the higher fees. Also when MtGox comes back online in ~3 hours I believe we will be in for some more bot action manipulation, especially with the temporary fee waive now.
ycombobreaker 14y ago
> Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. You are trivializing the real markets. What makes you think this is something that NASDAQ can just "do"? They had a system problem causing delays on Facebook's IPO, and they're still dealing with the shit-storm from that now. Everyone who had poor executions (or missed executions) as a result of the delay is trying to get compensation from the exchange for their technical problem. I haven't checked the exact number recently, but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs". Because bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in the same fashion as stock exchanges, I doubt that MtGox will be on the hook for anyone's poor executions. > I wonder how their stack is setup. As someone else pointed out, their stack is setup wrong if account management has _any_ impact on their matching engine. Hopefully, it was just the web servers which host both accounts-management and trading UIs. Regardless, there was clearly some resource-sharing which should not have happened.

lucb1e 14y ago

I never thought it was a DDoS, can't understand why people think this. Lots of exchanges have been down, one even seemed hacked (turned only a related service was hacked), and meanwhile the price only went up. The price drop is due to panic selling and lag. It was almost inevitable, also constant in the news. Now it happened and we can move on. The price is back to about 75% of what it was already, and I don't think it'll take more than a few months to break the previous price record. Or seeing how fast it's recovering, perhaps not more than a few days.

BrokenPipe 14y ago
There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and you can find so on the mtgox website news section. However it was not a DDoS in the classical sense that brought mtgox down to its knees but nonetheless a DDoS has occured. mtgox supports a weird feature whereby you're allowed to enter any buy or sell order even if you don't have funds. This means that whenever the prices matches your order the system needs to check whether you actually can with your balance fill that position. Via the api, it is possible to put tiny transaction even smaller amounts than what you're allowed via the webgui. It doesn't take much review of the ask and bid to find out that there were a huge a mount of micro tiny transactions all over the place. Those are in an ever higher volume when system begins lagging furiously and people panic. These are perhaps HFT, or maybe not, but those are the source of the lag and therefore the source of the panic. This is DDoSing and it's also mtgox fault for having a a toy exchange and us bitcoiners for using it. I long ago moved to bitstamp. You can find your local exchange i'm sure.

ck2 14y ago

Did anyone notice there was a SEVEN MILLION (USD $) transaction yesterday? http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91... Actually, $7M based on $100 value. If it was @ $200, well $14 Million USD.

weareconvo 14y ago
Maybe some bitcoins being shuffled around in the exchange?

dgreensp 14y ago

I moved all my bitcoins over to BitStamp (https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/) earlier today. MtGox has always felt a little unreliable at multiple levels. They sound earnest in their post mortems, but it's hard to tell if they are sufficiently competent with web technology to be doing what they're doing.

BrokenPipe 14y ago
you did very well. mtgox doesn't deserve to the first and probably not even the second largest exchange.
lucaspiller 14y ago
I moved to Bitcoin-24 (https://bitcoin-24.com/ https://bitcoin-24.com/ - mainly EUR), they seem pretty popular and have no fees for trading.
tomp 14y ago
Bitstamp is no better. If anything, the (comparatively) low trade volume makes it very dangerous. Yesterday, I put in an instant (market) order at about 5pm. It was fulfilled in about 2 hours, for $50 dollars less than the price was when I put it in. I would expect for market orders to be either fulfilled or canceled immediately, not linger pending for 2 hours.
- SEMW 14y ago
  Market orders are relisted every ~10mins at the market price until fulfilled. If you want to sell at no less than some $X, that's what limit orders are for. You used a market order when what you wanted was a limit order; that's not Bitstamp's fault (unless the fault is in making it clear what the difference is, but IIRC they do explain in the FAQ).
knowaveragejoe 14y ago
Bitstamp was down for a large portion of the crash yesterday as well.

tlrobinson 14y ago

Bitcoin needs a high performance, extremely secure, open source trading engine, with a standardized API that traders can use to arbitrage the exchanges. The tricky part is transferring other currencies in and out, and between the exchanges. "Ripple" also sounds promising for this purpose.

msgilligan 14y ago
There's nothing like that already? When you say "need" do you know it doesn't exist already? I'm genuinely curious and hoping you know the answer.
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  There was one called Intersago but it looks defunct: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-open-source-bitcoin-exchange http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/is-there-an-... I came across this project on bitcointalk, which isn't really an exchange but looks interesting: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

laichzeit0 14y ago

Magic The Gathering Online eXchange (MtGOX) refitted to trade a virtual currency which then had to scale massively in a short period of time. Yeah, I'd say there are serious architectural problems. This is not a software "design" problem though, it's the inevitable real-world result of software "evolution". It happens. I read they're working on a new platform built from scratch. I bet it's going to kick ass as they've got some real world experience now about what works, what does not and what needs to be hardened.

brador 14y ago

If you want to run a succesful pyramid scheme, step 1 is find desparate poor people, reddit is a great starting point. Ring up their greed impulse and the rest writes itself.

illuminate 14y ago
The hundreds of thousands of dollars people funnel at a time to 419 schemes indicate that there are plenty of desperate, greed-clouded middle-classed persons and higher-classed suckers. I suppose Pyramids/MLMs also work well among the lower classes, but they're hardly limited to them, diversify!

weazl 14y ago

I've been waiting for over a week to get my account verified so I can start using my account (I'm not in the US), but they only seem to verify a few hundred a day and there are still 5000 people ahead of me.. quite frustrating.

apapli 14y ago
I'm in Australia, it was 4 working days. IIRC The price went up from $60 to about $170 during that time, very frustrating. At least I'm verified now - but I have to say their lag time and apparent saling issues still concern me a lot.

edandersen 14y ago

It looks like whoever was behind recent events saw this as message claiming it wasn't a DDoS, chuckled and responded by... making a stronger DDoS. MtGOX is down.

Judson 14y ago
The press release did say that they may take the exchange down for a few hours. I'm not sure if that meant unannounced downtime like this though.

Mahn 14y ago

It's amazing how what is currently the largest Bitcoin exchange service can be so unprofessional. You would think they could have anticipated this.

num3ric 14y ago

The NPR Planet Money podcast just released a podcast Tuesday on Bitcoins: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-450-bitcoin-goes-to-the-moon http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-... It was the first time I had heard about Bitcoins, and so did many I think!

downandout 14y ago

There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users. Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be at the center of something as important as Bitcoin? These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies, many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.

makira 14y ago
"The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them." There is a big demand, I don't understand why VCs or YCombinator are not pushing a few startups in this direction.
- r4vik 14y ago
  see https://coinbase.com/ https://coinbase.com/
  - makira 14y ago
    I know about coinbase and use it, but it's very limited. U.S. only, is not a real exchange (buying bitcoins is often not possible), etc. And quite frankly, support is lacking too. Buying bitcoins is still extremely complex for most of the world. It needs to be simplified further.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    Coinbase is probably in it for the long run, and they are probably doing things to enable them to outlast the competition. However. On Monday I was planning to place an order for bitcoin on Coinbase and I was informed that the order would go through on Friday at the market rate at that time. That is somewhat worthless and extremely dangerous in a volatile market. For now, I consider their service unusable.

eli 14y ago

I'm impressed by how many commenters know the cause of someone else's infrastructure problems with such certainty.

mattacular 14y ago
Are you new to technology? This is the norm. Everybody is the smartest person in the room, regardless of how little they know about the details of the implementation.
olh 14y ago
Déjà vu.

eric970 14y ago

And now, guess what MtGox advises everybody do? Go drink some Champaign! To celebrate their massive success! I'm not kidding-- look at their latest bulletin on why they're suspending trading for the rest of today. You've got to be KIDDING ME. They don't seem to give two shits about their users or their money.