MtGox Bitcoin exchange hit by DDoS attack | Hacker News Reader

MtGox Bitcoin exchange hit by DDoS attack

bitcoin.org

27 pointsjimrandomh12 comments

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=6864.0

It's an infowar conducted by a Russian exchange guy who turned to the dark side.

Thanks for providing that. The biggest question I had was "Why?"

Even still, I don't completely understand his point (is he being rational?). Hasn't mtgox been invaluable in giving value to Bitcoins? Without it, it'd be harder to liquidate to hard currency, and the market value would be considerably lower.

He doesn't seem to be affiliated with a direct competitor to mtgox either, because that would also explain it...

EDIT: Yeah, I have a feeling he's being irrational:

  "The day before yesterday I was owed [owed] 100 BTC = $160 but today it $320 and it is too much for me. And it continues to grow simply because everyone is looking for people who cabal [can?] draw their own exchange rate on mtgox."

Although he has a completely valid point: the increased valuation of btc has increased his debts in real currency, he's approaching the problem in the wrong way. He technically is justified to a certain degree: mtgox has had this effect on btc. And now that it's down, I'm sure the exchange rate will fall.

In addition, it turns out that he runs btcex.com, a Russian competitor to mtgox.

The Russian dude was a competitor of Mt Gox.

So, bitcoinex sold a bunch of Bitcoin futures and got burned when the exchange rate shot up? Is that basically his beef here? I've been following the story in the Bitcoin forums and the #bitcoin-otc channel for a few hours, but it's not totally clear to me.

Edit: I consider owing somebody a certain number of Bitcoins and agreeing to transfer them by a certain time to be essentially the same thing as selling futures. In the long run, the value of Bitcoins will either go up dramatically or drop to almost nothing, depending on whether or not they become widely adopted as a medium of exchange. The idea of "regulating" the market to provide "stability" makes no sense when the very concept of Bitcoin is speculative at this point.

Most currencies have traditionally been managed by gentlemen with gentlemen's agreements, to the extent they've been managed.

This currency is unmanaged, but has a lot of Russians hanging around it, checking it out, DDOSing the exchanges now.

I am curious what Satoshi thinks of this; I imagine he would back some of the distributed p2p exchange proposals out there, but this is one of those circumstances where benevolent oligarchies would work better than what's happening.

I predict bitcoin exchange price spike when mtgox comes back online.

Why would the exchange price spike when there have been so many challenges to BTC's liquidity today?

It's already inflated per the CNN mention from this morning, and the majority of BTC holders are speculators who will want to cash out. (There's been over 100% increase in value--in less than one week)

It's back up and for right now, I was wrong, prices seem to have dropped. I believe that there are a small but significant group of people who actually need to use BitCoin to conduct their business. Liquidity problems hurt them, and their demand is inelastic.

There are certainly plenty of speculators, though, and I wish I'd bought more than I did back at $.07/BTC. :)

There's some lag between reading about BitCoin and actually driving demand, so I tend to see news response as driving up BTC a bit by speculation, and then a longer slower ride up.

That said, BitCoin has zero elasticity on the supply side, and it has for some time seemed extremely likely to me that prices will continue to rise drastically for some time.

Here's an interesting question prompted by a thread on the Bitcoin forums:

What happens if someone has a huge amount of Bitcoin (in this case, 370,000 BTC) and they die or their hard drive crashes (with no backup)?

Those bitcoins would be lost forever. It's covered in the FAQ. Eventually, the market would correct to account for these bitcoins no longer being available. You can think of it as a donation to all other holders of bitcoins.

That guy backs up constantly.

At some point, you have a really nice bounty for finding a hash collision, though. : ).

Why bother DDOSing the exchange when you could instead use the same botnet to perform all of the bitcoin computations legitimately at a massive scale? Am I missing something here?

The machines currently mining for bitcoins have powerful cpus and gpus. My guess is that a botnet consists mainly of lower-end desktop computers.

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