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Repeated DDoS Attacks Force Coinkite Bitcoin Wallet To Close Down Web Service
An anonymous reader writes: Coinkite, one of the earliest Web-based Bitcoin wallet services, has announced plans to discontinue its service and focus on a hardware-based Bitcoin products, all because of a barrage of relentless DDoS attacks that has been plaguing the company ever since 2012. The company plans to focus on hardware-based Bitcoin products such as PoS terminals, USB sticks, and professional servers. "Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well-funded pains-in-the-butt, and as a matter of fact, we've been under DDoS since the first month we launched -- over three years -- yay. Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers' pockets to defend our customers from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services," the Coinkite team explained.
Instead of script kiddies and organised crime trying to make a buck with their botnets.
Why can't a hosts file protect you from this? I mean, from what I hear on the IPv4 crisis, there really aren't that many IP addresses out there to block, are there?
I don't see how Ethereum would be immune to any problem related to fiat to crypto conversion. Right now there is none because most everyone buy bitcoin first then convert to Ethereum...
Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers' pockets
As opposed to giving them Bitcoin which isn't backed by anyone, may not exist tomorrow (or even later today) and costs them money to convert into something useful?
How odd they chose to use the very thing they've trying to get away from.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Like that pesky cap on mining, inflation forever!
Wah Sig!
IT hint.
Next time start with halfway decent servers so the first time a customer visits, they don't kill your service right away.
DDOS for the past 4 years .... please! .... ohhh gawd, no!
Now focusing on POS terminals and hardware
Those guys were jerks anyway - we flew all the way from Jamaica to Canada to see them - just to meet with them about getting Bitcoin ATM's and terminals in Jamaica - and they totally blew us off. Never turned up to the meeting then sent us a terminal to the hotel that we had to pay $800 dollars for or the trip would have been a total bust.
then when we got back to Jamaica they told us they dont do phone support - just online - so took us weeks to get our terminals up and running. currently they are in the dustbin along with coinkite huraaaaa maybe they pissed someone else off !!!
I would guess they are targeting someone in the company or they are working with someone in the company, not merely targeting the service for spite or to extort money.. unless they have a history of paying out in which case they did that to themselves. Bitcoin prob isn't going to mature much more anyway and newer/better things will replace it. It was a good effort, but the moment is all but gone and the BIG problem is that it's too easy to track and it winds up being regulated at which point it's an odd an inferior money payment system based off some weird number crunching hobby that people used to have. In the big picture bitcoin is likely a net loss when you factor in electric costs, hardware costs and serious technical limitations. Perhaps they can keep the existing value of Bitcoin and port it over to a more robust and well designed payment/money structure. As it stands Bitcoin is more like commodity or a collectors item than a currency. It's slow, it's prone to far to much human error, the blockchain is right out in the open, coins are too easy to lose or steal and eCommerce services that use bitcoin are immature and often prone to major security breaches. Any place that deals in bitcoin will attract more hackers because it's an ideal thing to steal remotely. The upside is that the big bad government can't see what you do.. and since bitcoin isn't secure that's not true either. The reality of even money laundering is that small time stuff doesn't require bitcoin and could attract too much attention currently. While bitcoin can in theory scale to large scale, it's just not that easy and people with millions of dollars have will invested frameworks to launder money as well as deliver money. It's good for a very select group of people who commit crimes remotely whether that be illegal purchases or services or direct bitcoin theft and often without a conventional criminal framework. Having mined and made some money in the cryptocoin market.. I don't see it as much more than that and it's scaling up far far too slow. Now.. perhaps that's ideal and keeps it where it wants to be.. out of the mainstream, but a lot of companies seem to think its going to replace Visa and I just don't get their business model other than to trick investors out of cash. Without fast payment or privacy Bitcoin sucks as a modern digital currency for the masses. It's a collectors item that some stores accept as cash,
This is why we can't have nice things.
Stop pumping etherbutts
baking cartel
Mmmmm....baking cartel.
I must've been talking to the Microsoft AI department too much, I read that as CoinKike first.