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More Bitcoin Exchanges Forced Out of Sync After Massive DDoS Attack
An anonymous reader tipped us to news that several Bitcoin exchanges have joined Mt Gox in suspending withdrawals after being forced out of sync with the Bitcoin network at large. After Mt Gox blamed transaction malleability for forcing them to suspend withdrawals, miscreants started flooding at least Bitpay and Btc-e with bogus transactions. Quoting the Bitcoin Foundation: "Somebody (or several somebodies) is taking advantage of the transaction malleability issue and relaying mutated versions of transactions. This is exposing bugs in both the reference implementation and some exchange’s software. We (core dev team, developers at the exchanges, and even big mining pools) are creating workarounds and fixes right now. This is a denial-of-service attack; whoever is doing this is not stealing coins, but is succeeding in preventing some transactions from confirming. It’s important to note that DoS attacks do not affect people’s bitcoin wallets or funds. "
perhaps a preview of the War on Wall Street, coming someday soon before we all die?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That looks like a bank run to me.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If I didn't know better I would suspect that the best time to invest in BTC futures would be about five seconds before the DDoS stopped.
I'll leave you to guess who is in the best position to profit from that.
stop the transactions, you hurt the value. This is a Fed operation, because they can't control it they're trying to destroy it and make it look like script kiddies. So fucking transparent...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Is this the begining of the end for BTC or just another peice of news that gets absorbed and somehow still drives speculation in the currency.
It’s important to note that DoS attacks do not affect people’s bitcoin wallets or funds.
Unless of course the exchange rates start dropping because of a declining confidence in the currency.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Its been an interesting few days, they're lashing out in fear and attacking their own, it won't be long now, here is a recap of what we saw:
1. MtGox made public that a well known bug which was being ignored by the bitcoin "developers" was being used to steal coins.
2. Almost instantly the "foundation" and "developers" released statements indicating that only MtGox was effected by and at fault and the remainder of the bitcoin ecosystem would not be impacted.
3. We saw a flurry of requests for Mark Karpeles to step down from the "foundation".
4. Suddenly almost all the bitcoin exchanges stopped allowing withdrawls because in contrast to what the "foundation" stated, bitcoin developers were responsible for this bug and it in fact effected the whole ecosystem.
It is very clear that this situation was caused by the bitcoin "developers" lack of interest in securing their code. It is also very clear that they attempted to hide this fact and shift blame to an innocent party.
Everyone was saying, "Bitcoin is just like currency, man, only better."
This may very well affect people's funds and online wallets. If an exchange doesn't find a transaction in the blockchain, because the exchange looks for a different transaction ID, the exchange may have reissued the transaction, effectively paying out twice. As these transactions are not reversible, but not the fault of the customer, the exchange will have to eat the losses. The current Bitcoin exchanges are not huge banks. They're not too big to fail, and when they do fail, they take your funds with them. They may not even have them anymore right now, but you don't know, because you can't withdraw.
thanks.
Some of the best hackers work for governments. This may be an attempt to destroy digital currency so that people are forced to contend with the historical money makers.
Red Flags
High returns with little or no risk. Every investment carries some degree of risk, and investments yielding higher returns typically involve more risk. Be highly suspicious of any "guaranteed" investment opportunity.
Overly consistent returns. Investments tend to go up and down over time. Be skeptical about an investment that regularly generates positive returns regardless of overall market conditions.
Unregistered investments. Ponzi schemes typically involve investments that are not registered with the SEC or with state regulators. Registration is important because it provides investors with access to information about the company's management, products, services, and finances.
Unlicensed sellers. Federal and state securities laws require investment professionals and firms to be licensed or registered. Most Ponzi schemes involve unlicensed individuals or unregistered firms.
Secretive, complex strategies. Avoid investments if you don't understand them or can't get complete information about them.
Issues with paperwork. Account statement errors may be a sign that funds are not being invested as promised.
Difficulty receiving payments. Be suspicious if you don't receive a payment or have difficulty cashing out. Ponzi scheme promoters sometimes try to prevent participants from cashing out by offering even higher returns for staying put.
Red Flags for Ponzi schemes
When will the gullible finally wise up?
You can bet your ass that this is state funded, if not directly state sponsored. The moment my dad asked me "what is bitcoin?", I knew that it was only a matter of time before it was killed off.
Because if there is one thing that organized crime WILL NOT TOLERATE, it is competition. And damned if the Fed and their masters on Wall Street will allow this activity to continue for much longer.
"Itâ(TM)s important to note that DoS attacks do not affect peopleâ(TM)s bitcoin wallets or funds."
Oh good. That should make folks feel so much better. I know I always feel safe when my bank goes down cascading with other banks to know my funds are "safe", I've just had my access to them taken away for an unspecified time frame due to their theoretical safeguards that are largely untested and fall prey to the most basic, grade-school level Internet "hacking" (DDoS) which is more akin to a prank when compared to a real attack.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you - the beginning of the end of the Bitcoin bubble. When those exchanges go back up those Bitcoins are going to be ripped out of there and anyone who isn't completely daft will sell them off , take what cash they can get and run.
You can bet your ass that this is state funded, if not directly state sponsored.
Right. Let's see, what's more likely? The US government going to the trouble to hire hackers all hush hush to screw around with bitcoin exchanges using annoying but ultimately pointless attacks OR the government simply exercising its law making powers? (hint, the answer is the second one)
No, this sort of attack is the work of criminals of some sort. Maybe of the organized crime sort or maybe simply the bored hacker kind. I don't pretend to know. It makes no sense whatsoever to think this was state sponsored.
The government doesn't have to engage in hacking to mess with bitcoin in underhanded ways that aren't going to have any lasting effect. If the government decides to go after bitcoin it will be more shock and awe, not ineffective commando raids.
NSA and GCHQ almost certainly at the behest of the Fed and BoE.
http://stormcloudsgathering.com/bitcoin-what-youre-not-being-told
This isn't a "government conspiracy" sending out bogus transactions. It's some jerk.
If you need to sell Bitcoins right now, Coinbase and Kraken are still up and running. Bitstamp is off line, and Mt. Gox is, as usual, screwed up. Mt. Gox hasn't paid out US dollars since June 2013. Whether they are incompetent, broke, or crooked is a subject of considerable speculation.
There's a technical fix in the works, but it will have the annoying side effect that when you spend Bitcoins in your own wallet, some Bitcoins you are not spending will be tied up for an hour or so. Bitcoin wallets don't really have an "account balance". What they have is a collection of items of different values. When you spend Bitcoins, the wallet software tries to put together a set of items that's over the value to be spent, with one output to the recipient and one output ("change") sent back to you.
Until now, you could can spend that "change" immediately, even though the distributed network hadn't yet confirmed it. It looks like that will be disallowed, and only confirmed items will be usable. The way this looks to the user with a wallet program is that you have a "Balance" and an "Unconfirmed" amount. Soon, when you spend, the "Unconfirmed" amount (which you can't spend) will go up for a while, then go to zero when the network catches up. Bitcoin is a distributed "consistent eventually" system. "Eventually" is about an hour. Longer during busy periods. (That's the next Bitcoin problem. The whole network has a limit of about 7 transactions per second. A few times in 2013, that limit was hit.)
Expect everyone except Mt. Gox to have this straightened out in a few days.
Oh, those cheeky GCHQ spooks and their DDsS shenanigans!
Hardly. I'd bet large sums of money this is the work of the US government.
DogeCoin to the fucking MOON!!!! Much profits!!!1
How does this not affect wallets and funds.
When there is a DDOS, faith in the system will go down, people will want to panic-sell to get their value, if they think there will be a technical problem getting their value in the future. This will trigger divestment, and will reduce the monetary value of bitcoins - which affects the value of those who held instead of selling.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There is no one nor entity backing up the currency like there is FDIC on the $. It's a big risk with my most liquid asset. Finance is all about mitigating risk and quite frankly bitcoin is too much of a gamble.
Do you think the idea of chained-hash record-keeping with proof-of-work is retarded? That's what allows bitcoin to keep a history of transactions which cannot be fiddled with, by anyone. Bitcoin happens to be the first implementation, but it can be used for any kind of digital data whatsoever. With this method, you can prove the data has not been tampered with or accidentally been changed (i.e. software or hardware errors). I'd say that is the opposite of retarded, it's very advanced and useful.
Do you think that money that only exists as data in a computer is retarded? Did you know that 88% of US dollars are that way? And that the vast majority of them are backed by other digital assets? (Mostly loans and Treasury bonds).
If not these, then which part do you find retarded?
Totally decentralised systems, looked at through the viewpoint of 19th century analysis and stats, can seem to work by limiting the control to infinity. in reality there is no infinity to limit it to, this is just a useful figment of mathematicians imaginations when counting stuff is impractical. Somebody's actions will always control the balance of the random behaviours that lie behind bitcoin. The problem then is that this control point will move around essentially near-chaotically. The bitcoin network will have a weak mind of its own, and behave with the complexity of a small insect rummaging around looking for food. A mass of bitcoin like systems will evolve to work together like an army of ants. Basically the abstract model of an ant colony from which nature derives real ants, is trying to evolve itself on the internet. Bitcoin is the begining of a virtual bit-ant infestation. There is a place for ants, but the world finance system is not one of them.
John_Chalisque
That limit is set by the finite size of a transaction (~ 250 bytes), and the hard limit of 1 MB per block in the block chain. Thus you can fit 4,000 transactions/block. Blocks are generated every 10 minutes (600 seconds) on average, thus ~7 per second.
The block size limit is intended to not overwhelm average PC's running a full bitcoin client (i.e. a node on the bitcoin network). There are several ways to deal with this limit. One is simply to gradually increase it, and migrate from user PC's to a distributed network of servers with more processing capacity. Another is "off chain transactions". For example, Coinbase.com has both 940,000 consumer wallets and 23,000 merchant accounts. So if a Coinbase user shops at a Coinbase merchant, the transfer is internal to their books, and does not need to hit the network. Eventually other aggregators can bundle up multiple user transactions and send it on the public block chain as a single large transaction to another aggregator. The details of who gets what amount can travel as a separate data file between them.
That's pretty much what happens in the traditional banking system. Banks settle up with each other once a day at a clearing house (usually the district Federal Reserve Bank). They add up all the day's checks going between a pair of banks, and then one of them pays the other the net difference. The actual payment goes across a private payment network (FEDwire) that only financial institutions have access to. In the old days, they had to swap piles of physical checks at the clearing house. With modern debit cards and electronic payments, it goes through an "Automated Clearing House" (ACH) which tallies up the amounts, but it is the same idea - lots of small transactions aggregated into one big daily clearing of the net balance between banks.
I'm not the above poster, but I find the idea of getting on board with an obvious pyramid scheme retarded. If you are not one of the original perpetrators you are probably just going to get sucked dry for their benefit unless you are lucky enough to come yo your senses and bail out early.
time to pick up more bitcoin!
Love the panic, going to make a small chunk of change off of it. :)
Google will help your potential marks see it for the scam it is. "Bitcoin scam" or "ponzi" are suitable search terms.
Also there the links provided by the poster above.
For your own defence why don't you wheel out the initiator of this scam. You can't? He's in hiding? How do you think that looks?
Another is "off chain transactions". ... clearing house ... That's pretty much what happens in the traditional banking system.
You've now replicated the costs and headaches of the traditional banking system, added on top of the costs and headaches of Bitcoin. The whole point of Bitcoin was supposed to be to eliminate the need for centralized, trusted organizations.
Is it just the fact that it's BitCoin (the massively overinvested) that makes you guys moan so much? Do you accept that cryptocurrency is a good idea, and an inevitable pathway for our supposedly technologically enlightened species? Do you see potential in Ripple? Controlled online merchant unions? Or are you waiting for your bank to add a swipe strip to your computer where your CD drive used to be?
Spent All My Mod Points
I think the point here is that they hit peoples' wallets, but not their bitcoin wallets. So saying it doesn't effect bitcoin wallets may be true, but doesn't account for the fact that this may have real economic consequences for their holders.
Wow, you mean you can prove that data has not been tampered with or accidentally changed?! Amazing. I can't believe they invented that!
Well, I'm off to use, I don't know, _anything_ on the Internet that uses hashing and digital signing which apparently didn't exist before fucking Bitcoin.