Silk road down for over 24 hours now.

[kriwest]

"UPDATE (04/30/2013 0035 UTC): We have come a long way in the battle, but still do not have the upper hand. It's looking more and more like a restructuring of the tor software or even the tor network will be required to mitigate the kind of attack we are under. If this can be solved by modifying the tor client software running the silk road .onion, then it will be a matter of patching and redeploying the hidden service. If it is a network issue, it will require the cooperation of the Tor developers, or running a new network of nodes. I haven't given up hope for a faster solution, but if one can not be found, then we will move to a semi private scheme where users will be given access through many private URLs. I'll keep everyone updated on how we will move forward, but please be prepared for a few more days at the least of no access."

[1714762968]

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[BitcoinAshley]

... Wait, silk road has been down for days and BTC price HASN'T tanked?

... Might this mean that BTC price isn't carried by Silk Road, i.e. we AREN'T still in 2011?

And according to some bull/bear schizos on here, the "speculators" have left, interest is down, and BTC is headed for the doldrums.

So if Silk Road is down, and "the speculators" "have left", and price is holding... major bullish, because it means price isn't based on drugs and wall st. wannabes, according to the bears' own arguments

   

[massivebitman]

Silk Road really can't have much to do with the price of bitcoin right now. People who are inflating the price aren't the users of that site. Money in should roughly equal money out on SR. The site shouldn't affect the big players, do you really think investors are putting 100k in bitcoin because they think the druggies are going to drive up the price? Quite the opposite in fact. Bitcoin being used for illicit activities is a risk for the big investor.

[julius]

So after more research Silk Road has two larger competitors BMR and Atlantis. 

Do these competitors use Bitcoin as well ?

[Chuck Finley]

2. The speed of the server has pretty much nothing to do with DDOS resistance.  DDOS is accomplished by saturating the network connection, not attempting to overload a machine that is simply piping data from disk to the network port.

That's incorrect.

While saturating a network connection is ONE way of causing a denial of service, overloading the target machine(s) so that they can't respond to requests even if the connection isn't saturated would also count as a DOS attack. As long as someone is intentionally trying to cause a network resource to become unavailable it's a DOS attack regardless of the means through which they cause that service denial. (If they're using a zombie botnet or some such then it's a DDOS).

[Templeton]

"UPDATE (04/30/2013 0035 UTC): We have come a long way in the battle, but still do not have the upper hand. It's looking more and more like a restructuring of the tor software or even the tor network will be required to mitigate the kind of attack we are under. If this can be solved by modifying the tor client software running the silk road .onion, then it will be a matter of patching and redeploying the hidden service. If it is a network issue, it will require the cooperation of the Tor developers, or running a new network of nodes. I haven't given up hope for a faster solution, but if one can not be found, then we will move to a semi private scheme where users will be given access through many private URLs. I'll keep everyone updated on how we will move forward, but please be prepared for a few more days at the least of no access."

where is that from?

[dandirk]

"UPDATE (04/30/2013 0035 UTC): We have come a long way in the battle, but still do not have the upper hand. It's looking more and more like a restructuring of the tor software or even the tor network will be required to mitigate the kind of attack we are under. If this can be solved by modifying the tor client software running the silk road .onion, then it will be a matter of patching and redeploying the hidden service. If it is a network issue, it will require the cooperation of the Tor developers, or running a new network of nodes. I haven't given up hope for a faster solution, but if one can not be found, then we will move to a semi private scheme where users will be given access through many private URLs. I'll keep everyone updated on how we will move forward, but please be prepared for a few more days at the least of no access."

where is that from?

The owner of SR, Dread Pirate Roberts on the SR forums which was running last night at least and seems to be a lesser target.

[drawingthesun]

So after more research Silk Road has two larger competitors BMR and Atlantis. 

Do these competitors use Bitcoin as well ?

Atlantis was Litecoin only last time I heard. Looks like selling my Litecoins was a massive mistake!

[mccorvic]

So after more research Silk Road has two larger competitors BMR and Atlantis. 

Do these competitors use Bitcoin as well ?

Atlantis was Litecoin only last time I heard. Looks like selling my Litecoins was a massive mistake!

Nope, best thing you ever did.

[glendall]

Must be one heck of a whoozy DDOS to take out SR for this long.

[Wuji]

... Wait, silk road has been down for days and BTC price HASN'T tanked?

... Might this mean that BTC price isn't carried by Silk Road, i.e. we AREN'T still in 2011?

And according to some bull/bear schizos on here, the "speculators" have left, interest is down, and BTC is headed for the doldrums.

So if Silk Road is down, and "the speculators" "have left", and price is holding... major bullish, because it means price isn't based on drugs and wall st. wannabes, according to the bears' own arguments

   

Ashley, don't be silly, I've been telling you forever the price is solely based on speculation and not usage or adoption.  Right now my best guess is it is being used as a temporary cash store in hopes of good news later on.  There is nothing surprising here at all.

Also Silk Road has had on and off issues for a long while so it will take more than 3 days to lose confidence.  If MtFUX didn't bring BTC down to double digits that shows the irrational exuberance is still at an all time high.  I've predicted a slowly downward trend for a long time although a panic sell based on possible news scenarios wouldn't shock me.  Once Silk Road comes back who knows another irrational bubble as I first was thinking.  I figured it would be up by today though.

EDIT - Also those with BTC in silk road can't panic sell currently their Bitcoins are gone unless the site comes back.

I don't want to spread FUD (just trying to use logic) but the longer Silk Road is down the more I worry a big cash out when funds do become available.

[Wuji]

Would mirroring the site under many different addresses make it ddos proof in tor?

The problem is that all transactions are stored in a database.  In order to mirror the databases have to be sync'd.  When you have high speed transactions this gets difficult with distance due to latency.  Wall street gets around this having invested billions of dollars in fiber connects and centralizing everything in one spot.  Of course if Wall street was the new 104 story building about to be completed I'd compare MtGox or Silk road as a 2 man pup tent.  Not to be critical but they are small potatoes.

But couldn't all the mirrors be run from the same source?  Because the DDoSers would just be targeting the website distribution in general, as opposed to targeting the specific source computer (if they could locate/target the source server then what would be the point of Tor)

So couldn't the dread pirate roberts just run 100 instances of Tor on the same server all with different tor addresses, but still serving up the same data from the same database?

But then again I have a really limited knowledge of Tor so this could be completely wrong.

What you are missing is that the mirrors are what we call the front ends.  That allow the interface to do transactions on the database or backend.  If the front ends are being DDOS'd this causes latency to the backend database (think of two people purchasing the same product 5 minutes apart on two different front ends) and the transactions get all out of whack.  It makes semi-real time trading almost impossible.  The only solution I could see would be to make all trading heavily delayed to mitigate the latency.

I don't architect trading sites based on BTC so I'm not sure if delayed trading could work.

[thebaron]

Price will go up if  SR is down hopefully. Less coins to be sold.

No dumb drug dealers cashing in by putting in market orders causing selloffs. That's one of my theories, anyways.

[bitcon]

Price will go up if  SR is down hopefully. Less coins to be sold.

No dumb drug dealers cashing in by putting in market orders causing selloffs. That's one of my theories, anyways.

site is down. no coins moving anywhere.

[iCEBREAKER]

Atlantis was Litecoin only last time I heard. Looks like selling my Litecoins was a massive mistake!

Tell me about it.  At least there's a chance the ounces of silver I paid thousands of LTC for will regain parity, someday.   

Atlantis accepts BTC and LTC.  Source: some guy on reddit.

Proposal: Split Silkroad by category into several .onion sites.  One for stoners, one for ravers, one for tweakers, etc. 

Give the adversary multiple targets to attack, diffusing their (hopefully limited) resources.

[meangreen]

Price will go up if  SR is down hopefully. Less coins to be sold.

you are kidding right?

[notme]

2. The speed of the server has pretty much nothing to do with DDOS resistance.  DDOS is accomplished by saturating the network connection, not attempting to overload a machine that is simply piping data from disk to the network port.

That's incorrect.

While saturating a network connection is ONE way of causing a denial of service, overloading the target machine(s) so that they can't respond to requests even if the connection isn't saturated would also count as a DOS attack. As long as someone is intentionally trying to cause a network resource to become unavailable it's a DOS attack regardless of the means through which they cause that service denial. (If they're using a zombie botnet or some such then it's a DDOS).

Sure, that's not the only method.  But saturating the link is the vastly most common method used in practice and so unless a solution addresses that, it isn't a solution.

[notme]

Would mirroring the site under many different addresses make it ddos proof in tor?

The problem is that all transactions are stored in a database.  In order to mirror the databases have to be sync'd.  When you have high speed transactions this gets difficult with distance due to latency.  Wall street gets around this having invested billions of dollars in fiber connects and centralizing everything in one spot.  Of course if Wall street was the new 104 story building about to be completed I'd compare MtGox or Silk road as a 2 man pup tent.  Not to be critical but they are small potatoes.

But couldn't all the mirrors be run from the same source?  Because the DDoSers would just be targeting the website distribution in general, as opposed to targeting the specific source computer (if they could locate/target the source server then what would be the point of Tor)

So couldn't the dread pirate roberts just run 100 instances of Tor on the same server all with different tor addresses, but still serving up the same data from the same database?

But then again I have a really limited knowledge of Tor so this could be completely wrong.

No.  You failed to address network link saturation which is the most common mode of accomplishing denial of service.

[meangreen]

... Wait, silk road has been down for days and BTC price HASN'T tanked?

... Might this mean that BTC price isn't carried by Silk Road, i.e. we AREN'T still in 2011?

And according to some bull/bear schizos on here, the "speculators" have left, interest is down, and BTC is headed for the doldrums.

So if Silk Road is down, and "the speculators" "have left", and price is holding... major bullish, because it means price isn't based on drugs and wall st. wannabes, according to the bears' own arguments

   

Ash, alot but not all of the people on the silk road have either gone to atlantis or black market reloaded to get their drugs now. the silk road is the major player but even though its down right now people that want their drugs will still carry on they arent going to sop all of a sudden so what you are seeing now is still people buying for their drugs, but you are correct there are no manipulators because there is no volume.. and please dont call ne a schizo

[meangreen]

... Wait, silk road has been down for days and BTC price HASN'T tanked?

... Might this mean that BTC price isn't carried by Silk Road, i.e. we AREN'T still in 2011?

And according to some bull/bear schizos on here, the "speculators" have left, interest is down, and BTC is headed for the doldrums.

So if Silk Road is down, and "the speculators" "have left", and price is holding... major bullish, because it means price isn't based on drugs and wall st. wannabes, according to the bears' own arguments

   

Ashley, don't be silly, I've been telling you forever the price is solely based on speculation and not usage or adoption.  Right now my best guess is it is being used as a temporary cash store in hopes of good news later on.  There is nothing surprising here at all.

Also Silk Road has had on and off issues for a long while so it will take more than 3 days to lose confidence.  If MtFUX didn't bring BTC down to double digits that shows the irrational exuberance is still at an all time high.  I've predicted a slowly downward trend for a long time although a panic sell based on possible news scenarios wouldn't shock me.  Once Silk Road comes back who knows another irrational bubble as I first was thinking.  I figured it would be up by today though.

EDIT - Also those with BTC in silk road can't panic sell currently their Bitcoins are gone unless the site comes back.

I don't want to spread FUD (just trying to use logic) but the longer Silk Road is down the more I worry a big cash out when funds do become available.

great post dude. Have you seen the message boards. People are going apeshit because they cant access their funds. You are right it may big a good time to short bitcoin after the road comes back up. alot of people have bills to pay.