If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..).
The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger than normal volume of trades occurring, it wasn't possible due to the lag on the exchanges.
I don't know why all those bitcoin sites were down, but the fact is that the largest bitcoin sites were all down for at least a few minutes each.
The intention though was probably to trigger a market reaction to buy in at lower prices. It appears to have worked temporarily.
There's actually a huge volume of trades during the dips, at least according to bitcoinity.
I still don't understand why they would bother spreading their attack volume across multiple sites. Hitting Mt.Gox with everything they've got offers two potential strategies:
- trigger a crash, buy low, stop the attack and watch it go back up
- trigger a price drop and profit massively from arbitrage with other exchanges still trading higher(BTC China for example)
If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..).
The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger than normal volume of trades occurring, it wasn't possible due to the lag on the exchanges.
I don't know why all those bitcoin sites were down, but the fact is that the largest bitcoin sites were all down for at least a few minutes each.
The intention though was probably to trigger a market reaction to buy in at lower prices. It appears to have worked temporarily.