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t’s been an epic few days: What happened?

Dear Mt.Gox users and Bitcoiners,

It’s been an epic few days on Bitcoin, with prices going up as high as $142 per BTC. We all hope that this is just the beginning!

However, there are many who will try to take advantage of the system. The past few days were a reminder of this sad truth.

Mt.Gox has been suffering from its worst trading lag ever, 502 errors, and at one point some users were not able to log in their account. The culprit is a major DDoS attack against Mt.Gox.

Since yesterday, we are continuing to experience a DDoS attack like we have never seen. While we are being protected by companies like Prolexic, the sheer volume of this DDoS left us scrambling to fine-tune the system every few hours to make sure that things don’t go beyond a few 502 error pages and trading lag.

Why has Mt.Gox become the target of a DDoS attack?
It is not yet clear who is behind this DDoS and we may never know, but these actions seem to have two major purposes:

1. Destabilize Bitcoin in general.
It is not a secret Mt.Gox is the largest Bitcoin exchange with more than 80% of all USD trades and more than 70% of all currencies. Mt.Gox is an easy target for anyone that wants to hurt Bitcoin in general.

2. Abuse the system for profit.
Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.

What can be done?
Believe it or not, there is pretty much nothing that can be done. Large companies are frequently victims of these kinds of attacks. Even though we are using one of the best companies to help us fight against these DDoS attacks, we are still being affected.

There are a few things that we can implement to help fight the attacks, such as disconnecting the trade engine backend from the Internet. By separating the data center from the Mt.Gox website, we will continue to be able to trade.

What can you do?
Like our favorite author here at Tibanne says… Don’t Panic!

“Panic-selling is a wide-scale selling of an investment which causes a sharp decline in prices. Specifically, an investor wants to get out of an investment with little regard of the price obtained. The selling activity is problematic because the investor is selling in reaction to emotion and fear, rather than evaluating the fundamentals.” (Source: Wikipedia)

I understand that many of you have a lot at stake here, but remember that Bitcoin, despite being designed to have its value increase over time, will always be the victim of people trying to abuse the system, or even the value of Bitcoin decreasing occasionally. These are not new phenomena and have been present since the beginning of time when humans first started trading.

Trade Engine Lags
Lag affects everyone, not only us, but also major, world-renowned exchanges like the NASDAQ and NYSE. We can fix lag, but we cannot eradicate lag. Only small exchanges with low volume and liquidity are immune to lag.

Does this mean that we are giving up fighting lag? Hell, no. We are working on it by creating a new trade engine that will solve many problems, but it’s not a magic bullet. We can always try to scale our servers, but we cannot predict what happens from external sources: DDoS, panic selling, immediate increase of buyers, etc. Lag will always be there, but our mission is to make lag as small as possible.

Account Verification
As if a major DDoS attack was not enough, we at Mt.Gox are victim of our own success!

Last year, Mt.Gox saw an average of 9,000 to 10,000 new accounts created every month. This number doubled in January, tripled in February, and sextupled in March. In this month alone, over 57,000 new accounts were created!

Our support and account verification team went from four people in January 2012 to twenty-two people working every day of the week. We are now hiring even more people to solve this problem by finalizing some deals with external companies.

Remember that even if you are waiting for your account to be verified, you can still deposit or withdraw funds via our Japanese account and make your trades! (Only accounts that we pro-actively required to be verified are limited to deposits and trade only.)

Finally
We have seen a significant amount of comments on the web (various forums, Reddit, etc.) that portray Mt.Gox as a company held by “idiots” and other rather rude words, complaining about inability to deal with lag and other system issues, without understanding the magnitude of work and attacks we are facing every day.

I understand the frustration many of you feel. We hate this situation as well. Since we took over Mt.Gox, we have been through Hell and back and we are still here. We are still the largest exchange with over 420,000 trades per month and USD $121 million monthly trade volume. We have worked our way through all the requirements needed to run our exchange legally.

Now, there are some things we can improve, but so far we are doing an incredible job that no other exchange has been able to do so far. While I understand a certain amount of frustration, realize what we have accomplished. I appreciate all the work you are doing everyday to push things forward and to help secure the future of Bitcoin

And to all of you who are supporting us on a daily basis, thank you! We could not have done any of this without your help!

"Don't panic" a reference to "A Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe"? Like Pirate@40's last post: "Thank you for all the fish"!

ah, come on, get a life :)

I have a question to gox. If they know exponential fundamentals of bitcoin well, why the hell they didn't prepare having millions of monthly income?

I will not trade on gox until they have this shit. I loose money coz of this shit. And what should I answer for this Facebook fart?

"I excuse you?" "It's okay for few thousands bucks of non-fully taken profits" "Please continue, I like your lag very much".

The shit about NYSE and others having lags is shit! They are fighting for MICROSECONDS of order processing to satisfy traders demands. I don't ask microseconds, i ask at most few seconds - 1000s times bigger than in normal marketplace.

Until there isn't - no excuses.

Lets look what did they done for fees we paying them?

1. Invented shity current interface with shitty AJAX which allow double-press buttons, works not in all browsers, it is heavy and not usable
2. Broke APIs without direct notification of merchans and all who use it!
3. Classic interface was not so "cool" but it was usable! And they broke it with changing apis
4. They broke their own mobile application by changing apis and this looks not fixed for a weeks
5. Constant troubles with money withdrawal

And they say what about this? They say they are the best! You are the best coz you were the first. The best in your service is liquidity. All other SHIT. I wish you great fall with it.

I will better pay arbitrage fees on other exchanges rather use your "best service".

I'm guilty as charged form badmouthing MTGox, but if you stop and think for a second, MTGox is probably the site with most hacking attempts right now in the whole Internet (don't quote me on that)
but one security breach and coins can disappear right away!! with the only trace being the block chain and some bitcoin addresses...
it's a dream for hackers.. not to mention the DDOS attacks.

As foretold by Boys and girls, I got news : we’re being probed. (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/boys-and-girls-i-got-news-were-being-probed/)

Probably time to point out that it's not MtGox who did "over 420,000 trades per month and USD $121 million monthly trade volume" - that's the users. MtGox's contribution is limited to preventing the other 580k or so trades per month that can't happen because they suck, generally speaking.

Much more interesting than releasing vague fluff of this sort (admittedly a step up from straight lying to the public, like here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=162481.msg1708983#msg1708983)) would be some actual workable system. Your cue, dear MtGox, is as always MPEx: The many ways available for talking to MPEx (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/the-many-ways-available-for-talking-to-mpex/).

Read that, learn from the only exchange in the world that traded just fine while being DDoS'd to crap, change your architecture to the correct one and actually start contributing something to the community (like stability, like dependability) rather than just leeching from it.

(Oh and by the way, MPEx charges 0.2% one way. Hint hint).


This is a lie. You are the fuckwits that leaked the largest selection of bitcoiners' emails into the wild. You're the fuckwits that nigh-on destroyed Bitcoin in 2011 - and by your own arrogance, too, as you were being warned you're hackable for weeks and you ignored it because stupid people always think they know better.

You're not doing an extraordinary job, or even a good job. You are doing an extraordinarily crappy job, and the gall to lie about it is not buying you any friends. (And since we're on the topic: you were going to release some sort of partnership last month. You announcing something and then failing to deliver and then never mentioning it again is exactly the sort of shady bullshit we're discussing here).

Mpoe, we need to find the cause of these resent attacks or atleast their origin! DDossing Bitcoin sites is quite common and not necessary related.

If this is a "political" hack, finding the country of origin should give a hint. Beside the price backtracking after $147, that may have tempted to leverage the coming down trend, the news from Japan yesterday, that they are going to start inflating the YEN could make this a good time for plugging the Bitcoin hole that's absorbing every clever currency trader from the real world, each time bad news hit the world market.

Yesterday I was quite sure that this was a hack for money. However the movements today don't look like anybody made a lot of money off this!

If Gox really want's to investigate this, they can look through their back logs to se who positioned themselves for this before the crash!

Do you realize that after all your venting, there's nothing positive left out of your comment?
You don't offer solutions, you don't offer ideas. It's so easy to be critical, yet, critics are the mediocre people that cannot do things themselves.
just saying..

She does offer solutions and ideas, available to anyone who doesn't insist on being fed finely prepared and target-group-tuned BS on a platter with smile. Me too can attest to MPEx trading in middle of DDoS on its web interface, and now it has even more independent avenues to place orders than before.

Also, if this didn't trip your bullshit detector, then surely nothing does:

When are you planning to complete this work?

The thing that makes me really angry is how they actually are saying that lag is a normal thing and that we should all learn to live with it.

The lag is annoying, and it is not normal. Take your business to other venues, boys! For most of us, the liquidity in Bitstamp is well enough.

Other points:
- incoming funds credited after 1-2 days, not 3-7 days
- lower fees
- I was verified the same day for 6-figure business, no hassles so far
- MtGox verification was 30 days, back last year

Yep. Basically saying they gave up lol.

It'd be nice I guess, but finding the source of DDoS is notoriously difficult.


That'd be chiefly because you cnat raed. Try harder.

Five days after the next-to-last Supper or a week after Coinlab comes out of beta, whichever comes first.

?! This can't be a coincidence


I personally think it has something to do with the infinite improbability drive

Exactly!


Precisely!


Absolutely!

The whole press release was a bunch of self-serving blame diffusion with the usual fuzzy vaporware promises.  Anyone who has ever traded securities, even in the 3rd world, would find the Gox platform to be absolutely pathetic and embarassing.  A handful of transactions makes lag go into the minutes?!  Back-end trading engine directly affected by front-end UI attacks?!  Seriously, if I was a VC or investor evaluating Bitcoin and was told that Gox was representative of the quality of the architecture of apps & services in the Bitcoin ecosystem, I'd stay well the f*ck away.

The *only* non-negotiable, very basic requirement for an exchange is to provide quotes and execute trades in a timely and accurate fashion.  WTF have they been doing for the past 2 years, if it's been known since at least 2011 that their architecture is crap and not scaleable?  If Gox was a public company, the shareholders would be rioting.  Everyone in this community should feel outraged and let them feel the heat constantly.  Their incompetence, by association, tarnishes the reputation of every single Bitcoin user and every single Bitcoin business.

Signed: a proud Gox non-user since early 2011.

It probably is a coincidence. In the demographic that includes English-speaking computer geeks between the ages of 30-45, knowledge of THHGTTG is nearly universal.

I would suggest to direct all these replies to the original thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.0

Luckily for everyone involved (including the respective muppets) and contrary to all the blather going on in mostly irrelevant venues (such as the press release circuit), any VC/money manager worth his salt knows MPEx is the bulwark of Bitcoin services and wouldn't seriously entertain MtGox anyway. But hey, there's a website somewhere with buy 1mn worth of Bitcoins buttons so it must be true, right?

Reddit mentality, guaranteed poverty.


They've not had any money up until very recently. Even if they did have any, the correct attitude is reactive rather than proactive anyway, such as, scale up a week after the need becomes obvious rather than keep vast overcapacity around a year in advance (sez MP). As long as they get their shit together and come up with an actual exchange by the end of the month they're making the grade.

The problem is that they're not quite intelligent enough, not quite experienced enough, don't really have the management ability and are much too inclined to lie to themselves and think inside a dirty little box to actually have a shot at all this. But who knows...even a blind bat finds a cave once in a while.


Except it's not. Dirty little box.

Why don't the guys behind MPEX launch an exchange to compete with MtGox?  ???

Because MP stubbornly refuses to touch fiat.

If you don't like mtgox, stop using it then?

Without mtgox I would probaly never have been able to trade at all or lost coins to hacks etc.

Thanks for you hard work mtgox, ignore the haters. You are the best exchange!

~From a over 2 year old user of mtgox with no problems ever.

It was posted in the correct area of the forum two hours before you started this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578)

That's too bad, but I understand the position.

Announcements about services belong in the "Service Announcements" subforum. Duplicate threads are undesirable and considering the level of traffic in this forum could properly be classified as a DoS attack.

And you don't need a brain the size of a planet to know that! ;)

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

But suppose you make vodka....

In Soviet Russia, Vodka makes potatoes.

Day trading is almost impossible with these lags.. you need to react in seconds and you can make orders in minutes, lol

MtGox has always seemed like the Walmart of bitcoin to me and I just don't trust em(gut feeling, no real reason).
So far, bitfloor has been working well for me(it seems), but I have recently been wondering if there is anything I can do to protect the coin/usd I am playing with.  The coin I am saving is on an external HD, but it would be a hard hit if I lost the few I have on the floor right now.  

Experience based learning is rough at this point.  MPEx....

Why the fuck are you guys bitching about Mt. Gox day and night when you can just take your business to another exchange as rpietila says? It's not Mt. Gox's fault that you stay on what you think is a shitty exchange. Get a grip guys, stop moaning and do something about your own problems.

Yeah, I don't have much problem with Mt.Gox; I have an account there but not much bother with it since:

- If I want to buy, it is so much faster to get money to BitStamp and therefore better price.
- If I want to sell, the price is better in BitStamp (and even better in btc24 or otc), also all the others credit your funds faster

Only masochist use Mt.Gox.

Oh well, I don't yet trust many coins in the smaller exchanges but with Gox I've learned to trust them  :D

Good for you but from the US it is harder to get to BitStamp than Mt.Gox via Dwolla.

So, what is the most ideal alternative for U.S. users compared to Mt.Gox and how far back into 2nd place are they in terms of volume and ease of funding? It seems to me that Mt.Gox is the most widely used for a reason or a few.

Bitfloor is the easiest exchange to get dollars into. Their volume is tiny though compared to Mt Gox.

Going to a Bank of America branch and depositing cash and seeing it in your Bitfloor account in 2 hours is pretty easy. In fact I'll be doing that tomorrow morning. Sure MtGox has volume but what good is volume if your trade lags and you end up blindly buying into the top of a spike? Then you have to wait another week to start seeing a return. 
Of course, if you like waiting 8-10 business days total, you can also ACH -> CapitalOne360 checking, and "CapitalOne360 P2P Payment" -> Bitfloor. And I'm sure there are similar options with at least one or two other exchanges besides Mt.Gox. Additionally, there is also LocalBitcoins, which it seems many people haven't bothered to look into but is another easy way to get coinz; obviously not for the daytraders though.

Oh yeah, as for P2P exchanges - isn't there something on freenet that's being tested? If you desire a p2p exchange, find one of those projects and help test it. Reminds me, I've been meaning to check that out. More testers and eventually P2P exchanges will become common - and we will get rid of the "banksters" once and for all. Half these centralized BTC exchanges could be doing the fractional reserve nasties behind our backs.

The secret is to always pull your bitcoins off the exchange as soon as your are done buying them. Then even if they are operating on a fractional reserve you won't end up being the bagholder.

Or Dads army?