Only hours into its first day live, Bitcoin Gold’s Twitter account announced it had been hit with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), forcing its website down for nearly four hours.
Also read: Major DDoS Attacks Hit Bitcoin.com
Bitcoin Gold Site Suffers 10 Million Hits Per Minute
Bitcoin block height 491,407 was reached 23 October, more than a day earlier than anticipated, triggering the so called Bitcoin Gold hard fork. It is the second such fork of its kind since August, and another is predicted mid-November, Segwit2x, at block 494,784.
Not long after celebrating block height 491,407, the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) team noticed 10 million hits per minute clogging up its web traffic requests. BTG’s Slack channel later attributed most of the hits to internet protocol (IP) addresses routed through China.
BTG’s founder and lead developer are from China.
It was a clear a DDoS campaign was used against the site, which rendered it essentially unavailable for four hours, causing numerous reports about either the team’s inability to insure against such basic attacks or the team’s lack of knowledge in critical areas of website security.
DDoS attacks are fairly routine, and many markets exist to facilitate those who wish to disrupt a company or group’s online activities. For under 200 USD, robot networks (botnets) can be had in the service of DDoS attacks. Smaller organizations are especially vulnerable.
Different From Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin’s first hard fork (Bitcoin Cash) went decidedly smoother. A perceived benefit of forks is the 1:1 mirror in coins/tokens a holder receives, roughly similar to perhaps a stock dividend. Users can then retain the new token or profit-take, selling off either “share” of the original or forked coin.
The BTG team has pushed out a proper launch, in the Bitcoin cash manner, until 1 November, which includes release of its code and essentially the ability to mine it. The same goes for a BTG 1:1 coin mirror.
According to its now-live website, BTG will eventually differ in other ways as well from Bitcoin cash. BTG will use the proof-of-work algorithm Equihash, will adjust its difficulty at every block, and incorporate a unique address format.
There are no BTG coins to speak of today (except the 100,000 pre-mined coins) nor a blockchain yet, but it trades as a future on the Bitfinex platform. As of this writing, it’s at 104 USD. BTG’s first day, however, Coinmarketcap reported it down over sixty percent.
Bitcoin cash had its early downs and ups as well, reaching highs of over 800 USD since its inception, but has since stabilized at slightly over 300 USD (as of this writing) with a 5.5 billion market capitalization (fourth among cryptocurrencies). It has the second highest 24h trade volume of all cryptocurrencies.
The source of the DDoS attack on BTG remains a mystery for now. That, combined with its soft launch plans in a couple of weeks, along with little knowledge of who its team members are (its lead developer goes by h4x3rotab), means the BTG project over-all retains a sense of mystery too.
Then again, we still do not know who Satoshi is.
What do you think about the DDoS attack on BTG? Is its price drop just growing pains? Does not knowing who the lead developer is trouble you? Tell us in the comments below!
Images courtesy of: Alejandro Cegarra for USN&WR, Eyevine, Diario Bitcoin.
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