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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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#ms...

Then what is the reason for the mass panic/selling?

Mtgox the exchange (not Bitcointalk the forum) is under DDoS which caused the panic selling.

The crushing inevitability of Bitcoin's failure?

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.

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.

250 requests per second is high?

Maybe they should start to use an SSD and some decent software.

250 HTTP request per second of static files is peanuts (heck, my website can sustain 10 thousand). But 250 HTTP requests affecting dynamic content on bitcointalk.org is a bigger engineering pb: the average page is 100kB of dynamically rendered HTML supporting per-user theme, and most HTTP requests modify content (forum post) or are expensive requests (post searches).

Theymos has been improving the forum software, and is offering bounties to people to implement certain things.

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