Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
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.
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.
Re: Gox's transaction volume capacity, the market is begging for someone to come along and solve these problems.
MTGOX is more than just a USD to bitcoin exchange.
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.
However many use Mt.Gox as their wallet so the TPB analogy doesn't quite hold that far, as Mt.Gox being taken down would mean these people wouldn't have access to their BTC funds stored in that wallet.
I should have mentioned this in my original post, but I was sloppy.
There are much better ways to utilize the convenience of a web wallet without handing all your coins over to some sketchy website, such as blockchain.info's wallet system.
When MtGox denies service, like today, this is because of a DDoS. They have said multiple times that they see 10+ Gbps (SYN flood and UDP packets) hitting their servers on a weekly basis!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...
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.
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.
If MtGox can't function, there are plenty of competitors.
That company is Salesforce.com. They paid quite a bit for those domains. :O
There has to be something like an escrow service connected to it though (centralized or distributed) in order to guarantee for the transaction to be completed, do you agree?
ps. ripple's website appears to be down..
The client side is on Github, but has absolutely no tests. Literally, the stub files for the tests are there, but that's it.
Node.JS dev community really needs to get religion with testing.
But lastly, it's also somewhat centralized. While you can run a Ripple daemon locally, the actual currency's distribution is centralized. Which I think is... not smart.
I can see a federated exchange, lot's of exchanges using using each others liquidity to do trades.
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.
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.
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.