All bitcoin sites, whether they are forums or exchanges went down. It was a widespread DDOS on pretty much anything bitcoin related. For example: bitcointalk.org was also down.

I'm going to vote on the side of "people hitting bitcoin related sites to figure out why the price is dropping so fast", as opposed to an "actual" DDOS.

The result, however, amounts to the same thing.

At about the same time as mtgox was slammed with a DDOS, Dwolla (which is a common intermediary to get money in and out of mtgox) was too. The timing seems highly suspicious.

just to keep the discussion going, I'm also going to vote on the side of "people hitting bitcoin related sites to bring money in and out of it", as opposed to an "actual" DDOS.

That still does not verify beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a widespread DDoS on "pretty much anything bitcoin related". Can you please explain why such attackers would bother spreading their DDoS volume across such a wide range of sites instead of focusing it on the one site that handles 80% of btc <-> usd conversions?

What exactly causes reasonable doubt here ?

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"

This doesn't follow in the event of a run.

Wouldn't it make sense that everyone is logging onto those forums and comment about the price changes? I would think anything bitcoin related has a high volume today. Including HN.