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Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’
- the_cat_kittles 13y agoWho stands to gain from repeatedly DDoSing Mt. Gox?
- olalonde 13y agoOther Bitcoin exchanges.
- fchollet 13y agoSpeculators. Slowing down exchanges drives the price of BTC down. So the plan is to start a massive DDoS, stop it, buy BTC at a lower price, and sell it again when the prices went back to their previous levels.
- pemulis 13y agoThe 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 13y agoI 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.
- willlll 13y agoPeople who want it to go back to its original function of a magic the gathering online exchange
- ConceitedCode 13y agoIs that really how it started? What prompted the change?
- willlll 13y agoYes. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817170606/http://mtgox.com/gwt/mtgox.php http://web.archive.org/web/20070817170606/http://mtgox.com/g...
- idupree 13y agoA couple years after 2007, it appears mtgox.com was being a fantasy game (possibly inspired by Magic The Gathering but not the same) http://web.archive.org/web/20090812073342/http://www.mtgox.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090812073342/http://www.mtgox.c...
- dustcoin 13y agoThe original owner of mtgox had the domain name lying around. As far as I know, even the original mtgox bitcoin exchange shared no code with a card exchange.
- jvm 13y agoNobody's mentioned it, but their competitors would be the big obvious winners. I don't know if I think they are the likely culprits, but Mt Gox has a major network advantage right now over its competitors which is surely being drained by these attacks.
- mikemoka 13y agoIs something like a distributed peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange in the works? Will something like that ever be released?
- swinglock 13y agoDistributed how? I don't think such a thing is possible, someone will have to deal with the banks.
- mikemoka 13y agoI edited the original post, what I was referring to was a P2P bitcoin exchange, impossible to DDoS, and possibly built upon the technology shown by the bitcoin project itself
- shredfvz 13y agoA solution exactly like what you've just described is in the works. Zyocoin is a P2P Bitcoin exchange utilizing multi-signature issued "debt", where debt can be BTC, USD, EUR, or bananas. Real contracts are created with verifiable blockchain-based timestamping. Debt is issued with colored coins. Ripple attempts to do something like this but I feel it must be done natively on the blockchain to see widespread acceptance. Python programmers wanted. Send a BitMessage to BM-oq7iLGGH7e7JJaqiTcUj1qGQYxeZVo65b; IM zyocoin@jabber.org or join #zyocoin on Freenode.
- eric_bullington 13y agoAre you using Entangled? I've looked at doing the same thing, also using colored coins. But it's going to take a lot of work + luck to go up against someone as well-monetized as Ripple. Plus, the technical issues are not even the biggest challenge, it's forming and managing a clearing house in a decentralized manner. I'm not sure it's possible. But someone has to physically conduct the exchange of dollars, euros, or bananas. Otherwise, you've just developed a p2p version of localcoins.
- foobarqux 13y agoThe 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 13y agoAt 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 http://i.imgur.com/yPLufjj.png
- eof 13y agoIt is clear you are following the situation as closely as those "ignorant members of the bitcoin community"; as MtGox themselves are calling these DDoS attacks and have reasonable proof of such. It is also true that Gox's matching engine is .. uhh.. not upto snuff, but your accusation that 'ignorant members of the bitcoin community' are just calling everything a DDoS is in itself, quite ignorant.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoMost people don't know what a DoS or DDoS is outside technical circles; and it's become a bit of a joke in the Bitcoin community that every problem anyone encounters with MtGox or pretty much anything else can be attributed to a DDoS attack. Re: Gox's transaction volume capacity, the market is begging for someone to come along and solve these problems.
- runn1ng 13y agoIs (D)Dos on Mt.Gox even a news anymore?
- KaeseEs 13y agoIt 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 13y agoIt 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_ 13y agoQuoting 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 13y agoNo, 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.
- cjh_ 13y ago
- joshmlewis 13y agoI'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 13y agoI 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 13y agoIf 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rmc 13y agoThere are probably easier ways for the US gov to break bitcoin. A 51% attack on the bitcoin network (which requires a lot of computing power), would allow you to transfer all the bitcoins, would be much more crippling than "oh a website went down".
- joshmlewis 13y agoReally? Downvotes for just suggesting a scenario?
- drivebyacct2 13y agoPeople 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.