Bitcoin hacking: MongoDB infrastructure choice led to a hackeable system in finance

It's a dirty little secret that everyone knows: Bitcoin exchanges built on top of first-generation NoSQL infrastructure lack even the most basic measures to guarantee the integrity of their accounts.

A very interesting article on some Bitcoin exchanges that, based on NoSQL technologies (specifically MongoDB), have suffered from concurrency in their systems and have been (successfully) hacked.

What happened at Flexcoin, or Poloniex, or any of the other Bitcoin exchanges beset by technical problems (and I'm looking at you Coinbase!), was not an outlier or unexpected or unforeseable. The infrastructure is broken. And it is broken by design.

Flexicoin recently suffered a hacker attack that may well be shown to students on concurrency classes so they gain interest on how to make easy money due to exploiting other people's failures.

Bitcoin meets NoSQL: The story of Flexicoin and Poloniex


This article provides some ideas on fixing the problem, and also had the merit, in my case, to introduce HyperDex, a system I didn't know that provides consistency + scalability that they proactively evangelise.

I am working now for a firm specialized in finance, so I'm going to pay an extra attention to this kind of articles.


Extra Ball from Hacking Distributed: How-to make documentation on infrastructure.

Big Data Architecture Patterns - Eddie Satterly from Splunk

A nice, basic introduction to the BigData / NoSQL ecosystem on Big Data Patterns.
The word pattern can be a little bit misleading: when I first came to the video, I expected more of big data application structures. It is more of a basic introduction to the state of things, and then an intro to some NoSQL systems (Mongo, Cassandra) and Hadoop.  After that, Eddie Satterly from Splunk, speaks about real world applications - so for those initiated, you can skip the first half hour... or maybe skip the whole talk :)