Impossible to trade this, INSANITY!

[MaxCoins]

What's bottom is the question, of course. Hard to tell with such a trading lag.

[NABiT]

This isn't an attack. Please notice all bitcoin sites are significantly lagged right now. This is called a run on the bank. FUD, etc. Keep an eye on the price, once it bottoms out, buy. I agree with the other posters. If they "halted" trading because of this lag, there'd just be twice as much lag later.

One idea though would be to halt this lag, bring in cloudflare, resume trading, handle everything smoothly.

Bitstamp uses cloudflare, it's still all over the place.

[MaxCoins]

Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/bitcoin-crash/

[datafish]

I feel sorry for the guy who bought at 266 and for the guy who sold at 105.    Never a dull moment in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

[MaxCoins]

I feel sorry for the guy who bought at 266 and for the guy who sold at 105.    Never a dull moment in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Yup. Bought a few at $128 today. Now back to $198.

[btchaver]

pretty much does this every week, not difficult to predict the top and put in buy orders, or just hold, no use trying to trade but why would you when other exchanges have no lag for one third the cost?

which ones are cheaper then gox which ones are one third of the cost?

[GernMiester]

How can you do anything with that?  Any prediction you are going to make 20 mins from now when MtGox catches up is asinine.

* ErebusBat wishes we had a decent exchange with stop loss / take profit orders.

I have the answer. Get out of BTC you don't have the balls for it.

[threeip]

This isn't an attack. Please notice all bitcoin sites are significantly lagged right now. This is called a run on the bank. FUD, etc. Keep an eye on the price, once it bottoms out, buy. I agree with the other posters. If they "halted" trading because of this lag, there'd just be twice as much lag later.

One idea though would be to halt this lag, bring in cloudflare, resume trading, handle everything smoothly.

Bitstamp uses cloudflare, it's still all over the place.

Gox already said cloudflare or aws wouldn't help, who knows why.
Plenty of trades in otc today ran smoothly...

[kgo]

Gox already said cloudflare or aws wouldn't help, who knows why.

Cloudfire caches web pages.  This is good for serving static content or something that doesn't get updated every second like a blog page so your main server doesn't get beat up..  But you can't really cache a trade order so cloudfire doesn't help with that.

[b¡tco¡n]

I feel sorry for the guy who bought at 266 and for the guy who sold at 105.    Never a dull moment in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I don't feel sorry for them, they might both make a profit.

E.g. the guy who sold at 105 purchased at 3
The guy who bought at 266 holds on and sells for 1000

[giszmo]

MtGox should refuse to take orders worth less than 1ct. * 2 ^  seconds_lag. This way people can't arbitrarily cheaply keep the lag up.

[ErebusBat]

MtGox should refuse to take orders worth less than 1ct. * 2 ^  seconds_lag. This way people can't arbitrarily cheaply keep the lag up.

But that will actually make the problem worse:  your trade didn't go through... so you keep retrying and retrying until your trade does, or the system crashes under the load.

Companies like Cloudflare and Prolexic (which MtGox already use) don't actually help because they have to send each and every trade/api request on to the Gox servers.

[giszmo]

MtGox should refuse to take orders worth less than 1ct. * 2 ^  seconds_lag. This way people can't arbitrarily cheaply keep the lag up.

But that will actually make the problem worse:  your trade didn't go through... so you keep retrying and retrying until your trade does, or the system crashes under the load.

Ok, I don't agree with you on that but there is another problem:
If I can effectively put 100000 orders into the order book with one bitcoin, I can put these orders anywhere into the book and they will affect the resources needed later when things get busy. The problem are not the small orders entering the order book in busy times as these are fast to execute but the big orders hitting all that dust, that is where the engine takes time to do all the book keeping.
Therefore, the small order rule would have to apply at any time, so a 100BTC order doesn't have to eat through 100,000 orders but "only" 10,000 at max.
Actually 80 minutes of engine lag cost MtGox customers and cost the Bitcoin value which essentially also costs MtGox profit. Sadly these flash crashes are when MtGox makes a killing that very day but still I'm sure they loose with this lag on the long run, so they should evaluate the real costs of each position in the order book and charge that to their customers as a minimum price per position. Or if they trust on people keeping to spam the order book even lower the fees for all others at the same time. A penny bot is not profitable because it buys valuable bitcoins at the right price but because it manipulates the price for other merchants that take "last price at MtGox" as a measure to price their goods and services, so these bots will not care about some small fee but those spamming uncharted parts of the order book with pennies, they do care and will adjust their behavior.