SatoshiDice hit by DDoS attack, but bets continue

Bitcoin gambling site SatoshiDice has recovered after being felled for several days by a DDoS attack.

The site went down several days ago, and was inaccessible from the Internet. Erik Voorhees, who created the site and sold it for $11.5 million in July, no longer runs the site, but naturally still has insights into how it operates. DDoS attacks happen a lot to bitcoin gambling sites, he said.

“They largely wasted their money,” he said of the attackers, pointing out that the website isn’t needed for the placing of bets. It simply provides information about bet statistics, and bitcoin addresses to send to.

These addresses are constant, available outside of the main site, and can easily be retained by regular gamblers even when the site goes down, meaning that bets can still be processed. "They’d have to launch an attack against the whole bitcoin network," Voorhees said.

There is a back-end computer processing the bets, but this isn't the same computer that hosts the website. Attackers could potentially disrupt betting if they were able to find that machine, but Voorhees points out that it could easily be moved.

The attack didn't seem to affect the site's popularity in the long term. SatoshiDice vanity addresses made up eight of the most popular bitcoin addresses used on the network overnight.