mtgox under Distributed Denial of Competence attack

[aantonop]

A horde of incompetent engineers, mealy-mouthed apologists and clueless morons have inundated MagicTheOnlineGatheringeXchange hiring department and have been inadvertently hired.

As a result, mtgox is currently limited to one trade PER hour. This is to ensure the continued "reliability" of the service.

See, when you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions, it is important to laugh at your customers and THANK them for making you a "victim of success". Because nothing says "Thank you", like a one hour lag that wipes out 1 BILLION USD from the valuation of your nascent currency.

No, thank YOU mtgox. Thank you for teaching us all to avoid your "service" before bitcoin gets so big that you become the Lehman Brothers of bitcoin.

[jorov]

Bitcoin should have stayed decentralized.

80 % of all Bitcoin trade ? WTF ?

[bit-joker]

If mtgox is so crap as you're saying, you can always create a better company and offer a better service. Instead of blaming mtgox ", you can start using their competitors or create a new company to compete.

[aantonop]

Unless I am willing to start an exchange, I can't complain about the obvious incompetence of mtgox?
I am a customer who just watched a company destroy $1 billion of value because of technical glitches.

Bet you loved Microsoft too and thought no one should criticize them unless they went out and made their own OS. Eventually someone did and I worked on that project too (Linux). Isn't that a rather wasteful way to solve problems?

I'd rather people realized that mtgox were victims of their own incompetence and tried the other exchanges. More volume on the other 4-5 exchanges would remove mtgox as the single point of failure.

[Lethn]

Bitcoin should have stayed decentralized.

80 % of all Bitcoin trade ? WTF ?

The great thing about an unregulated market is these guys will go out of business and the next people will have to be better rather than get a bailout.

[alexeft]

Every piece of machinery has a certain capacity and its managers usually size it to the work it usually has to do. Greatly oversizing it is not a good thing to do.

Yesterday, almost every other exchange had great lag. I can perfectly understand them being the victims of the sudden bitcoin publicity and the new deposit confiscation laws around the world.

Gox is already adding servers and bettering their code, at least as far as they have told us.

Have a little patience and faith people.  

[aantonop]

Every piece of machinery has a certain capacity and its managers usually size it to the work it usually has to do. Greatly oversizing it is not a good thing to do.

Yesterday, almost every other exchange had great lag. I can perfectly understand them being the victims of the sudden bitcoin publicity and the new deposit confiscation laws around the world.

Gox is already adding servers and bettering their code, at least as far as they have told us.

Have a little patience and faith people.  

Oversizing?

Have you ever done capacity planning? Have you ever configured a scale-out architecture?

Don't worry, neither has anyone at mtgox...

You keep patient, your patience will be rewarded by more flash crashes, if you think that mtgox is getting better. They're getting worse because a non-scalable architecture becomes more and more fragile the more hardware you throw at it if you don't know how to architect.

[rograz]

They should just close down account creation until they can sort their shit out, would be good for the bitcoin community as a whole if they helped pushing people towards other exchanges and stabilize their service.

[jorov]

But they want the mils !
They just made a million $ in 1 day ? Would you close your business if it performs so good ?

[aantonop]

Would you close your business if it performs so good ?

Let's close it for them. The exit is that way -->


bitfloor, btc-e, intersango, kraken, crypto-trader... many old and new options.

[shkiser]

BOYCOTT GOX. They control the majority of btc exchange, and with every flash crash they are taking in more of the BTC%; allowing them to continue their pump and dump, and orchestrating these spikes and falls, profiting from each one.. How fucking obvious does it have to be. Their recent anouncement is proof enough. Gox gloating at their tremendous profits they just reaped in a matter of hours. How foolish can ppl be? If we cant divert this power away from mt gox, I dont want to have anything to do with the btc and making these guys billions. This is crazy.

[alexeft]

Every piece of machinery has a certain capacity and its managers usually size it to the work it usually has to do. Greatly oversizing it is not a good thing to do.

Yesterday, almost every other exchange had great lag. I can perfectly understand them being the victims of the sudden bitcoin publicity and the new deposit confiscation laws around the world.

Gox is already adding servers and bettering their code, at least as far as they have told us.

Have a little patience and faith people.  

Oversizing?

Have you ever done capacity planning? Have you ever configured a scale-out architecture?

Don't worry, neither has anyone at mtgox...

You keep patient, your patience will be rewarded by more flash crashes, if you think that mtgox is getting better. They're getting worse because a non-scalable architecture becomes more and more fragile the more hardware you throw at it if you don't know how to architect.

How exactly would you scale out any architecture having to quadruple its capacity within less than a month? Including the relevant human resources, not just machinery.

[Aztec]

They were very unprepared but I don't know how much of that is their fault. Would other organisations be able to deal with the level of DDoS attacks they experienced?

This is a question

[alexeft]

They were very unprepared but I don't know how much of that is their fault. Would other organisations be able to deal with the level of DDoS attacks they experienced?

This is a question

It was not only gox that were unprepared. It was just about everybody, including this very forum (btw it is slow as we speak).
But that is to expected with that kind of skyrocketing growth that bitcoin and the community around it is experiencing.

At least that is my thought.

[deadweasel]

They were very unprepared but I don't know how much of that is their fault. Would other organisations be able to deal with the level of DDoS attacks they experienced?

This is a question

It was not only gox that were unprepared. It was just about everybody, including this very forum (btw it is slow as we speak).
But that is to expected with that kind of skyrocketing growth that bitcoin and the community around it is experiencing.

At least that is my thought.

It is expected of incompetent operators of exchanges, forums, etc.  Everyone knew this influx was coming, especially those operators.  They have not hardened their systems, upgraded servers, or protected themselves with anti-ddos technology.

Forum has some THOUSANDS of BTC for upkeep, none of which has been spent to improve the forum.

MtGox, only really profitable in the last couple of months (due to incompetence), had plenty of time to upgrade and re-organize their systems for the incoming onslaught that was apparent to everyone.  They did not do so.

The only thing that should have been expected is that none of these organizations have acted in the slightest bit professional way.  This is Bitcoin-BETA -- expect BETA service or worse -- it is all you will receive.  


You can all still buy/sell/trade here:  http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php    <-- The only decentralized exchange besides LocalBitcoins.com.

[Sage]

Another exchange doesn't solve the problem that is inherent in the system architecture.

The only thing that solves the Mtgox problem is a decentralized exchange.  And that's gotta be an open-source endevour.

[alexeft]

Many decentralized exchanges would be even better as there is no single point of failure, but this industry in brand new and undeveloped yet.

Demanding that much is like going into a newly discovered forest and getting angry because there is no fast-food!!!

[alexeft]

You can all still buy/sell/trade here:  http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php    <-- The only decentralized exchange besides LocalBitcoins.com.

Thanks but I don't day-trade. In the case of bitcoin, I don't even year-trade.

[someguy123]

Another exchange doesn't solve the problem that is inherent in the system architecture.

The only thing that solves the Mtgox problem is a decentralized exchange.  And that's gotta be an open-source endevour.

I wonder what's keeping people... I mean there is ripple, sort-of, and there's also bitcoin-otc.

[Aztec]

This is Bitcoin-BETA -- expect BETA service or worse -- it is all you will receive.  

Good way to describe it. In a book I read called the mythical man month (I'd recommend to anyone) the author pretty much says the first thing you develop should be thrown away and rebuilt because it's only when you actually build the thing that you realise it's failings and potential. Feature creep anyone?

At least after all this debacle lessons should have been learned and services should improve. Either that or BTC and it's governing infrastructures will be replaced with something else.