After days of intense growth, Bitcoins peaked at an unprecedented value of $266 last night, shortly before a crash which saw some investors selling them for as little as $105.
The Bitcoin market showed signs of recovery the following morning, but started falling again during an outage at Mt.Gox, which handles the majority of all Bitcoin trade.
Mt.Gox announced on Facebook that last night’s crash was not caused by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, but rather as a result of increased trade and new users signing up. The increased trade caused the Mt.Gox trading system to lag, which caused panic amongst some investors who started “cashing out” their Bitcoins, further exacerbating the situation until the trade engine froze.
Mt.Gox also revealed that the number of trades had tripled in a 24 hour period, and the number of new accounts jumped from 60,000 in March to 75,000 in just the first few days of April. Around 20,000 accounts are now being created each day, which is not surprising, given the potential investment value that has become widely evident over the past few weeks.
One investor was fortunate enough to have sold nearly 70,000 Bitcoins ahead of the crash. These would have been worth more than $18 million if sold at the very peak of the market, which demonstrates just how remarkable the growth has been — less than 3 years ago, 10,000 Bitcoins were used to buy $25’s worth of pizza.
Mt.Gox went down for a short period late this morning (Thursday) while it performed some system maintenance and added several new servers to its system; however, as soon as this maintenance was completed, Mt.Gox was subjected to another DDoS attack.
mtgox.com is hosted by Prolexic, a company specialising in DDoS protection and mitigation, whilst the read-only APIs on data.mtgox.com are served via CloudFlare’s content delivery network.
Dynamically updating performance graphs of the most popular Bitcoin trading sites are available here.