Bitcoin Forum

Hey all,
 
As many of you were aware, BitInstant’s website was down for roughly the past 24 hours. The site is now back online and fully operational.
 
We apologize for the lack of communication during the downtime and much thanks for your patience. We had discovered an issue which required some changes to the site and we had to take the live site down to make these updates. There was no hack or anything nefarious.
 
During the downtime we also decided to remove Coinapult as an outbound payment option. We hope to add it again in the near future because we know it makes it very convenient to acquire Bitcoins, but we have to be very careful about our AML compliance. Coinapult will need some adjustments before we can re-connect it. Coinapult is still live and running, but we can’t connect it with BitInstant for the time being.
 
We saw that some people speculated that there was a connection between the site downtime and Roger Ver being detaining in Macau’s airport. They are totally unrelated (though it makes for a great conspiracy theory) – the Macau airport just got mad because the Japanese airport didn’t stamp his passport correctly, so now he’s being held until he can fly back to Japan to re-stamp the passport (gotta love bureaucrats!)
 
Anyway, we’re back in business. Onward!
 
-The BitInstant Team

So you can now only use BitInstant to fund another exchange where you can ultimately buy the bitcoin? Am I understanding this correctly? No more bitcoin direct to email?

No, that will be turned on probably Monday.

Glad I'm not the only one.

 :o

That sounds infernal.

For all the fearmongering about the US Government people do, it is probably the Chinese we will have most trouble with.

Fixed

But it looks like cash deposits to major banks are no longer supported?

Working on getting it back up!

Subscribers to this thread will get an email when Yankee replies. 
Yankee, will you reply when:

• Pay To [Bitcoin address] is back up?
• Cash Deposits to Major Banks is available?

Thanks!

Is it that hard?   :o

Of course!

The latter may take a little longer, we will comment on that soon, but adding about 10 new deposit location companies so doing a major switch.
The prior (Bitcoin address) is being revampted into a cool new system, so instead of us buying BTC at one exchange, we do it at 1 of 6 exchanges to get you the best price...will comment more soon.


Nope.

I love BitInstant and it's great that they are working on improved/alternative services but this highlights the need for users to develop their own private trading partners/networks so that they don't become reliant on any one service. Banks should only be involved as a last resort because I think we all know that this is where the banksters will eventually attack. Do you have your own exchange partners lined up outside the banking system yet?

Yes we do, prepared for this  :)

I'm known for leaking things...so will stop here

+1
My question was directed to individual users but I like your response!

Ah, in that case I recommend http://TradeYourBitcoin.com or LocalBitcoins.com ;D

not to resurrect a thread, but is there an issue today? i can't get to bitinstant.com right now. :(

http://isitup.org/bitinstant.com

looks down

Getting DOS'd, working on it.

thanks for quick response. :D i'll try it later. no rush for my part.

Its back!

good to hear  :)

I get "This website is offline... No cached version is available" from CloudFlare.

We are under a heavy DoS attack right now.

We just paid a payment slip that was supposed to go to BitStamp.  Will that still go through or do we have to wait til the DDOS slows down?
I've been thinking of ideas that might get around the DDOS, at least for BitInstant customers who know enough to visit this thread (or other BitInstant threads on sites not hosted by the bitInstant servers).

What if you turned off the main BitInstant site and connected a copy of it running on another server to the same database, and then let people here know the IP of the second server?  I understand that would be letting the attacker know too, but AFAIK, a DDOS attack has to be built up by deploying little scripts on lots of different servers, which takes some time.

Dave.

Hey Dave

Nope, all orders are processed on a different server unknown to the hacker. Won't be affected.

He is attacking our load balancer, our actual servers are fine. You can access our website via IP address, its the domain name which is the issue.


Doing that now actually. The site still works, you just have to refresh 2-3 times, our anti-DoS protection will realize your not an attacker and allow you in


Agreed! We are staying ahead of the curve here.

He is injecting fake events and quotes, but we are doing 2 things to fix that now

Thanks Dave! Feel free to PM me ideas

-Charlie

There are a number of Bitcoin-related services experiencing atypical DDoS attacks in the past few weeks and these seem to be increasing in number.  It's like it has gone far beyond simple griefing and / or theft as the motive.  It's like there is a fatwa against Bitcoin.

Confirmed (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/o-hai-i-was-justing-doing-a-penetration-test-of-your-site/).

In high school, I read Goedel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid (http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567), by Douglas Hofstadter many years ago.  In it, he describes a battle of sorts between his character Achilles and the Tortoise (I think) over a record player.  The tortoise keeps insisting that Achilles can't build a record player that can play every record, because the tortoise can make a record that plays a frequency that will resonate some mechanism in the record player to the point of destruction.  This is the nature of the game.  The only thing is, the developers will always be here to make another record player after the current one is resonated to destruction.

After college, a friend of mine tried his damnedest to give me grief about my positions on things.  It was always a game for me.  Maybe that's because I grew up with three siblings and we were always trying to win arguments and bicker with each other.  We're all good friends now.  So I guess the point is, for anyone out there griefing us BTC people, you're playing a losing hand.  Why don't you join us?

It's the first thing I think about every morning

I'm still having trouble accessing the site. I can get the form to specify input and destination for the transfer, put in my info, etc, but then when I go to generate the money-transfer form I get either a page that says "none", or an offline cached version of the transaction form, missing all images and such. Is this a known issue?

We just updated a fix for it, let me know if you get this issue again.

It appears that I can get to the zipzap page now, but when I try to go through their form to create a slip for cash payment, their giant green "Create Payment Slip" button is broken. They don't have any contact info on their site anywhere, so I'm not sure how to ask them about this problem. I've tried four different browsers, including my mobile phone, to no avail. Is anyone else getting through and able to make cash deposits?

Was down for 1 hour, working now.

It is down again.