Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthuggins | Hacker News Reader

Mt. Gox was not being hacked or DDOS'd, it had a legit influx of users opening accounts.

Um, there was definitely DDOS'ing going on. I witnessed it myself with a bunch of other sites (bitcointalk, bitstamp, bitcoincharts etc). Mt Gox was trying to do damage control and spin it positively. That failed and now they are reporting DDOS again.[1][2]

"@MtGox Maintenance Over however we are now under a DDoS attack." [1]

Mt Gox has taken a credibility knock, which has a ripple effect on the BTC pricing right now.

Overall it probably a temporary setback, but does bring to light irrational exuberance voices ignoring others that were calling for a more decentralized ingress/egress between USD and BTC. IOW bitcoin needs more exchanges to drive competition, and perhaps even meta-exchanges too.

[1] https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/322281690309468160

[2] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/456123227805423

What evidence do you have that each of these sites weren't going down just because of real high traffic?

I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that each of those sites would have naturally seen their greatest traffic surge with the events of yesterday. For example, over 20% of all subscribers were present on /r/bitcoin (for comparison, (eg) /r/android is currently at about 0.5%, /r/bitcoin is around 10% now).

There have been large sequences of micro-transactions of 0.01 BTC, all on the heels of one another. That points to market manipulation/DDOS.

I'll see if I can dig up sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com