Ninjastic
PostEdited versionsQuotes to this post
Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
TERA
on 07/01/2014, 07:42:28 UTC
Quote from: DaSheep on January 07, 2014, 07:38:33 AM
Quote from: TERA on January 07, 2014, 07:24:38 AM
Quote from: DaSheep on January 07, 2014, 07:21:20 AM
Stop spreading FUD.

There was no hack or some other strange thing, it was just a huge market maker bot burning some money to clear and reshape his range of the orderbook:


This caused a spike in traffic and maybe killed the http API.
The websocket API was working all the time (60s lag though).

Very interesting.
So, these days a 700btc trade kills the mtgox api,  but back in april/may on those days with the 200,000btc volume and the 20,000btc trades - well then it was just fine?

No.
Dumping 200k BTC = one API call.
Clearing the book, placing new orders and moving alot of orders in HFT style = ALOT of API calls.
And since you don't want other people to place orders while you're doing this, you have to be fast, really fast.
The http API is slightly faster in accepting orders, so I guess it fired a huge batch of orders in like a second, causing a DDOS of the gox webserver.

Maybe the DDOS wasn't an accident at all since it prevents "normal" traders from using the web interface.
It's still hard to believe that some vulnerability like this surfaced just now with mtgox's tiny volume and not back in the old days when it was the market leader and thousands of people were trading there, with the ticker constantly on fire and shooting rainbows and fireballs everywhere.