Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
KynloStephen66515:
BTC Trades halted after major drop in value.
As of right now the MTGOX website is showing:
Service is down for emergency maintenance for one hour, until 2013-04-11 23:30:00 UTC. Please retry at that time-www.mtgox.com
--- End quote ---
MTGOX Released the following statement:
As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine! To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys: – The number of trades executed tripled in the last 24hrs. – The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.
--- End quote ---
Bitcoin plummeted more than $160 yesterday after hitting a new high of $266. It continued to fall on other exchanges Thursday, trading below $100 in many. Two months ago the digital currency was valued at $20.
As of this moment, BITSTAMP is valuing $72.00/BTC but exchange rates are for information only.
[edit]
After refreshing the MTGOX website, I can now only see the following text
Database access error, please retry later
--- End quote ---
[/edit]
Panic selling seems to be at the heart of this problem.
Due to the nature of the so-called "Crypto-currency", there is no physical backing. Not being on the public stock market, or based on any governments economy, BitCoins are notoriously difficult to predict. Due to this, people rely on each others reactions, in order to figure out when to buy and sell.
Over the past several weeks, MTGOX have been subjected to a bombardment of DDOS attacks, causing some major downtime, severe trading lag, and the inevitable panic selling that comes along side seeing prices fluctuate wildly.
Amongst all this however, BitCoin saw its highest ever trade value of $266/BTC.
[edit2]
The MTGOX Website is now showing:
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.3.11
--- End quote ---
[/edit2]
If any of you do have real money currently riding on BTC, I would love to know your thoughts on the ups and downs, and also...do you plan to panic sell?
KynloStephen66515:
As soon as I posted the above, the MTGOX website re-appeared. Perfect timing really.
Lets see what happens from here.
<Update>
Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow the market to cooldown following the drop in price. Read more details on the support. Additionally trading fees will not be charged within 48 hours of trading resuming (until 2013-04-14 02:00am UTC).
--- End quote ---
</Update>
The latest press release from MTGOX currently says:
TOKYO - JAPAN - April 11, 2013 Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night. First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine! To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys: - The number of trades executed tripled in the last 24hrs. - The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day. Due to these facts we have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand. We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance. Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system. Thank you for your understanding and continuous support!
Regards
Mt.Gox Co. Ltd Team.-https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html
--- End quote ---
TaoPhoenix:
This whole thing sounds like a gorgeous scam now, and this is about where the propellers are being fired up for that night-flying.
40hz:
Hacker News has a post by Dan Kaminsky who casually attempted to do a hack on bitcoin - and (somewhat predictably) failed.
Not much depth in the article, but it does provide some insights into how bitcoin's protocol works - even if it does sound like the author is occasionally regurgitating info off some "talking points" PR sheet.
By all extant metrics in security system review, this system should have failed instantaneously, at every possible layer.
And, to be fair, it has failed at other layers – BitCoin thefts have occurred, in the meta-code that surrounds the core technology itself.
But the core technology actually works, and has continued to work, to a degree not everyone predicted. Time to enjoy being wrong. What the heck is going on here?
First of all, yes. Money changes things.
A lot of the slop that permeates most software is much less likely to be present when the developer is aware that, yes, a single misplaced character really could End The World. The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent. Software tends not to kill people and so we accept incredibly fast innovation loops because the consequences are tolerable and the results are astonishing.
BitCoin was simply developed under a different reality.
The stakes weren’t obscured, and the problem wasn’t someone else’s.
They didn’t ignore the engineering reality, they absorbed it and innovated ridiculously.
--- End quote ---
Worth a read since it's that much more grist for the mill. And some of the information is quite interesting. Link here.
TaoPhoenix:
Hmm. Well, sure, there's a couple of bright fellas behind it. So maybe they caught the most obvious bugs. But it just feels like something is unstable for the Long Game, and when that happens a few people win and lots of people lose. I just don't have the complete theme of how it will play out yet.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version