Quote from: Logik on April 11, 2013, 03:30:39 AM

Have they not heard of Amazon EC2? Google Compute Engine? Heroku? Azure?!

"Adding more servers" - what is it, the 90s? Amateurs..

We've learnt that you can never add enough servers to cope with an unpredictable and quickly-changing demand curve. That's why they invented elastic computing. They add 3 servers now, next month those 3 servers can't handle. So they add 3 more, and so on and so on.

As much as I think Gox has some very serious issues and is currently unfit for purpose (clearly they have some horrible legacy and crazy architecture to content with - e.g. I heard someone mention the web front is not decoupled from the trading engine - WTF?!) it just not that simple.

Anybody who knows about how to build fast highly secure exchanges that have to guarantee perfect consistency with regards to state/transactions would think twice about using any sort of public virtualised infrastructure. Physical hardware is still the norm in this domain because raw single threaded clock speed and fast IO (e.g. solid state drives) often matters a great deal for exchanges and trading platforms. To give you to example I have direct knowledge of: I worked at Betfair in the past and they were considering building bespoke hardware chips to run the code of their core exchange engine to ensure they could scale their platform for the future and I know a friend at Merrill Lynch who told me about their servers which ran in oil baths to enable over-clocking raw CPU speed matters. There are many other example of custom hardware in use by banks and the like. To think anyone would use Heroku for an exchange is laughable. And I speak as someone who choose to build an app on Heroku or any other PaaS/IaaS provider 99% of the time. And I didn't even mention security.

What I do hold Gox accountable for though is not investing in their platform a long time ago. I can't believe they haven't had the money to build an entirely new trading engine and hire a really good team to build and support it. They have been very short-sighted. Any good start-up has a plan in place to scale if they start to experience exponential growth.

I think we should be using some of our Bitcoins to fund the building worthy alternative - I certainty don't hold much faith in any of the others so far. An exchange for bitcoiners, built by bitcoiners.