Silk Road forums

It's important to point out again that there was no "correction", no mass cash out by early adopters, and no overall loss of confidence in bitcoin. It was a technical failure. Huge lag caused a panic, just like several times before.

It's an opportunity of sorts. Just play the game of the ddos hackers. Buy low sell high, rinse and repeat. Use this situation to you benefit.

If it was easy to do that, why didn't any of you sell at $260?

The problem with these day trading strategies is that you don't know you're in a sell off until you're halfway down, and you don't know you've hit bottom until you're halfway up.

Right, Safe Mail is clearnet, which comes with certain risks that you are protected against with Tormail. The trade off is that Safe Mail has been around for at least a decade and has reliable uptime. They also provide POP access, so you can use Thunderbird + Enigmail + Torbirdy.

Torbirdy will automatically configure Thunderbird to use Tor, plus it does some other things to protect your anonymity, such as changing the time zone to GMT and scrubbing metadata from the email header. Enigmail integrates PGP, so you can do transparent de/encryption of your emails. Most importantly, with POP mail, you can download your mail and store it locally, so if LE asked for your account info (the operators are in Israel or some place anyway), they would find nothing, not even encrypted emails (assuming the Safe Mail operators don't keep your email).

And of course, the server logs would only show that exit nodes accessed the account.

People need to stop selling bitcoins on MtGox, it's dangerous that they have such a monopoly on sales, whether this was result of DDoS or not, its just not right that trade of a decentralized currency is so centralized on one company's servers, especially a company has such poor infrastructure.

Forget MtGox, spread the BTCs across more exchanges to strengthen the currency.

You echo the sentiments of many people in the bitcoin community. It would be nice if Coinbase started their own exchange. They are well positioned to do so anyway.

Nice work, and these are important words of wisdom:

What can you do?

Like our favorite author here at Tibanne says… Don’t Panic!

"Panic-selling is a wide-scale selling of an investment which causes a sharp decline in prices. Specifically, an investor wants to get out of an investment with little regard of the price obtained. The selling activity is problematic because the investor is selling in reaction to emotion and fear, rather than evaluating the fundamentals." (Source: Wikipedia)

I understand that many of you have a lot at stake here, but remember that Bitcoin, despite being designed to have its value increase over time, will always be the victim of people trying to abuse the system, or even the value of Bitcoin decreasing occasionally. These are not new phenomena and have been present since the beginning of time when humans first started trading.

If you bought BTC in the last week, then you've lost money. Don't panic and hold onto your coins. The price will go back up. The market didn't lose confidence in bitcoin today.

The price is extremely volatile. There was a $50 bid-ask spread earlier, but even now I saw the price jump from $187 to $130 to $150 within 15 minutes. I wouldn't put much stock on it. Let things settle down and check back tomorrow.

$145 drop within a few hours is the most volatile I have ever seen BTC

Yeah, because it wasn't worth $145 until 6 days ago.

That's what we have to remind ourselves, because the latest price instantly becomes the new normal. The low was $105, but that's still higher than BTC had ever been in its history until like 10 days ago, and it was higher than most of the prices at which people predicted crashes.

Following up on the attack idea, here's what someone posted on another forum:

An insider email was leaked onto r/bitcoin a couple weeks ago. Basically a group of rogue traders on Tor organizes a planned DDOS of MtGox at a specific date and time - thus locking out everyone from creating new trades - while simultaneously creating a sell off over 4 hours. The fact that no new trades can be created combined with the price dropping precipitously causes a panic, which grows. At the height of the panic, they buy back in (because they are the ones controlling the DDOS, so they get to make the profitable trades). Everyone else loses their ass who reads the price manipulation as true market price and panics. More people need to understand this because no one is actually panicking at first; it's price manipulation through the DDOS dropping the price, not actual mass sell off. Still people just blindly look at the price of MtGox and don't consider this as a possibility even though it's happened frequently over the last few months. Information is power.