MtGox has said they were subject to DDoS attacks: https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/317423311174909954

> If you looked at the log plot[2], it still looked exponential!

Trying to divine future price movement from looking at a graph has been proven definitively, repeatedly to be foolish.

Keynes may have been mistaken on a lot of things but he got one thing right: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

My specific prediction less than a day before this crash was "At this rate, the crash is a single-digit number of days away".

The market can NOT stay irrational for long when an asset's price doubles every few days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5517460

The efficient-market hypothesis does not have an asterisk excluding cryptocurrencies.

Truly, the capacity for people to employ cognitive bias is staggering.

I think you'll find that I'm empirically right.

This is what people mean when they say "efficient market" in this context:

> In finance, the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) asserts that financial markets are "informationally efficient". In consequence of this, one cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns on a risk-adjusted basis, given the information available at the time the investment is made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

There are variations of this hypothesis, so saying "it's dead" is meaningless unless you specify which one is "dead" and how it has failed.

Also: Empirical analyses have consistently found problems with the efficient-market hypothesis, the most consistent being that stocks with low price to earnings (and similarly, low price to cash-flow or book value) outperform other stocks. Which is presumably due to cognitive bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

PS: It's a reasonable simplification that's useful for the average investor, but not policy makers for example.

Are they running on 1 server?

Of course this is bad design, but you have to remember that this website started out as Magic the Gathering Online eXchange. It was built to trade playing cards, not to serve as a multi-million dollar currency exchange. The trading engine was retrofitted for bitcoin, and was stuck with several bad design decisions as a result. While I agree this should have been fixed long ago, MtGox has had its hands full recently. The massive growth in its userbase, the ever-growing verification queue, and the fact that it is expected to be online 24/7 have made things difficult.

However, I suspect the main cause of today's massive has to do with this: https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html

It will interesting to see what effect this policy change will have.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/455962117821534

[2] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/453409538076792

[3] https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/320043013420249088

http://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/453409538076792

"There are a few things that we can implement to help fight the attacks, such as disconnecting the trade engine backend from the Internet. By separating the data center from the Mt.Gox website, we will continue to be able to trade"

I agree there are plenty of people in bitcoin ready to be 'the greater fool' [1] but that's only if it fails... they will be self assured visionaries otherwise...

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specul...

'The HN forums is full of smug dismissiveness like this'

It's a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, and tons of sites were DDOS'd and simultaneously going slow or down (bitcointalk, mtgox, bitcoincharts, bitstamp). The evidence is my own eyes and refreshing browser timeouts. Everything back to normal now.

Highly unlikely that all those sites would be bought down by "panicked" users alone.

Given profiteering DDOS attacks against casino operators are commonplace, I find it a stretch to think these attacks are not happening regularly against bitcoin sites.

Anyhow, there's a correction every once in a while. It then goes higher than before, I'm still not convinced it is a bubble afterall.