Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

I&#x27;ve not bought in to Bitcoin yet. It just seems like a massive, world-wide scam to me. I&#x27;m not saying that it is a scam, I&#x27;m just saying that Bitcoin is something that I don&#x27;t really understand, and so I don&#x27;t entirely trust it.<p>That said, this event is extremely encouraging. Not only is the security and the viability of the currency being tested. But more importantly, the communication and cooperation between the major players in the Bitcoin ecosystem is being tested. And so far, the community is kicking ass.<p>To me that signals that perhaps Bitcoin really is a viable currency for the long term, and that it may really be a great way to think about money and value exchange.

It&#x27;s interesting to watch actually, submit a transaction to the network at the moment and there&#x27;s a rogue node that will mess with the padding of the signatures and rebroadcast it <i>faster</i> than the original. It confuses the reference client into duplicate display, which is what Gox is relying on for the failed&#x2F;success display. That they&#x27;re winning races over the normal related transactions isn&#x27;t that unnatural as the transaction processing stuff has a 100ms sleep() in the middle of it.

Day one: Slander the biggest exchange and hang your neck out calming the entrenched. &quot;They are amateurs. This is that exchange&#x27;s problem. $1000 is but days away.&quot;<p>Day two: Uhh... &quot;Stay calm. This is just the expression of that non-issue looking like an issue. We know what we&#x27;re doing.&quot;<p>Bitcoin has, generally, intrinsic crash protection right now. The price can&#x27;t plummet if you can&#x27;t find trading partners. Nobody really knows the price. The dotcom crash was from lofty to zero. As the price eats through panic sell thresholds, pants are shat. At least with commodities, people can point to the ones that went to 0 and stayed there. Since it hasn&#x27;t happened with bitcoin, people can still sing the &quot;it always bounces back&quot; tune.<p>I&#x27;ve kicked the dead horse of stability. I&#x27;ve hinted at liquidity issues, but this is a grave lack of liquidity. The only thing left is any belief that there is value. If that starts to deteriorate due to the other issues, <i>poof</i>

In another thread, there&#x27;s a comment that kinda explains what is happening exactly, in a nice analogy <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7219266" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7219266</a>

Is the real goal of these attacks perhaps to drive down the price temporarily, so that the attackers can purchase at a discount, and then sell shortly afterwards when the price goes back up?

Didn&#x27;t coindesk just report yesterday that the &#x27;transaction malleability problem&#x27; that MtGox was worried about was already known and a non-issue?

Funny: everyone said &quot;oh, gox is stupid, no one else is affected&quot;... one and a half days later, all those are proven wrong.<p>Not to be an excuse for the consistent problems with MtGox, but everyone who is affected by the current DDoS attacks should just shut the f..k up.

Didnt this same thing happen in April 2013? Somehow a DDOS attack drove the price from $250 to $75. Then it went back up. My guess is the same thing happens here. Two years ago people used to bitch when the price dipping below $15. Here it is at $650. A week is not complete unless someone claims to be witnessing the demise of bitcoin.

This will make them only stronger. Bitcoin is not going anywhere.

I think a lot of people are viewing this as a bad thing, hence the BTC price sliding. If BTC is going to become a global currency then exchanges and banks better be prepared for this kind of stuff. After fixing this issue, I doubt many companies will make the same mistake in the future.<p>Better to get these bugs out of the way now than in two years when market cap is much greater.

Marks another interesting step toward maturity of the concepts of crypto currency. It is interesting to watch this in the context of other technologies (like air travel) which went from novelty to everyday thing, albeit through a series of &#x27;events&#x27; which at times seemed likely to doom the idea.

The reason why exchanges and other software are having trouble with malleable transactions is not due to bad software using transaction ids. It&#x27;s an edge case with the reference bitcoin client. See: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xm49o/due_to_active_malleable_transaction_relayers_it/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Bitcoin&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1xm49o&#x2F;due_to_activ...</a><p>Basically the reference client allows an edge case where it allows spending an unconfirmed output if that output was generated by the wallet itself as change. This can form a chain of unconfirmed transactions. When the malleable bot modifies the original one they all become invalid. The reference client does not handle this case well, it gets balances wrong, and clogs the wallet up.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate that Mt Gox got a lot of heat for calling out the issue from the foundation and core developers saying that malleability was known and wasn&#x27;t a bit issue. in fact it is an issue due to this edge case in the reference client.

The most fascinating thing about this whole process is watching the btc community try to keep it moving. As someone who doesn&#x27;t know anything about digital currencies, this seems like one of the first major tests of an philosophy of unregulation.

Setting up a rogue node that messes with all transactions is the best way of hurrying a proper fix to the protocol that will also be deployed ASAP and accepted by everyone!

Given the asymmetry in the difficulty market participants have with selling (and withdrawal in fiat, in a timely manner) or shorting bitcoin, as compared to the effort involved in buying bitcoin, any news is bullish news. This should hold generally and is not specific to publicity about the attack.<p>Assuming equal reach for would-be-sellers and would-be-buyers, more buyers are capable of expressing their opinion in the market than are sellers.

Is this why I saw a bunch of super small incoming transactions to my coinbase wallets that then promptly disappeared?

I have no proof what so ever, this is just a conjecture: there are powerful government and private entities who profit from manipulating the current monetary system. I have to ask: is it unreasonable that state actors would try to crash Bitcoin out of self interest?

What was the intent of including something like transaction malleability in the Sotahsi client?

It seems like the whole bitcoin community is immature.

Someone should pen the next James Bond story around Digital currency manipulation. What a fascinating world.

Massive attack requires massive resources.<p>Maybe foreign government? Heck, domestic government?

concerted massive attack: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKxnCGziUVA" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iKxnCGziUVA</a>

Funny if it was Mount Gox trying to prove a point.

TheWayTheyFightBack

is btcchina affected?

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