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A Finnish Student Gets Bitcoin Slashdotted, Crashing the Website Within the HourA Finnish Student Gets Bitcoin Slashdotted, Crashing the Website Within the Hour

One campaign to get noticed by tech nerds overwhelmed bitcoin.org's hosting in under sixty minutes, then indirectly created Mt. Gox a week later.

The CampaignThe Campaign

Martti Malmi, an early forum regular known by the handle sirius, had spent weeks campaigning for this exact moment. "Slashdot with its millions of tech-savvy readers would be awesome, perhaps the best imaginable!" he wrote on the Bitcointalk forum, pushing other early users to help make it happen.

On July 11, 2010, it worked. Malmi sat in his dorm room, headphones on, a can of energy drink beside him, watching Slashdot prepare to post the story. This was the moment he had been chasing since finishing an internship months earlier, purely to get Bitcoin real attention outside its small existing community.

The CrashThe Crash

The bitcoin.org website and forum ran on modest rented hosting, unable to handle more than about one hundred simultaneous visitors. Within an hour of the post going live, the site buckled under the load and went down completely, alongside a wave of dismissive comments from readers unconvinced by the whole idea.

Malmi scrambled to scale up hosting capacity that same day. The mockery in the comments did not bother him much. This was the exposure he had wanted for months, and an overwhelmed website was, in its own strange way, proof that it had actually worked.

The AftermathThe Aftermath

The next morning made the real difference clear. This was not a one-day spike. Bitcoin software downloads jumped from around 3,000 in June to over 20,000 in July. Gavin Andresen's Bitcoin faucet gave away 5,000 free BTC the day after the post went up and ran completely empty.

The Unexpected LegacyThe Unexpected Legacy

Among the people who found Bitcoin through that Slashdot post was Jed McCaleb, an American who had spent his days building an obscure online game. He owned an old, dormant domain left over from an earlier project trading Magic: The Gathering cards online: mtgox.com.

Seven days after the post that overwhelmed bitcoin.org, McCaleb quietly announced a new exchange built on that leftover domain. Within three years it would handle 70 percent of global Bitcoin trading, before collapsing entirely. Mt. Gox's entire origin traces back to one overloaded website on July 11, 2010.

Part of an ongoing series on Bitcoin history. This event falls on July 11, 2010.