Over the weekend, GAW Miners launched their cloud-based mining platform Hashlet. The system, which allows users to buy, rather than lease, hashing power in a cloud-based mining operation, was expected to have a significant demand as it went live. What wasn’t expected was that demand would be so high for the service that it would temporarily crash GAW Miners’ payment service, Shopify.
Reports on a variety of bitcoin-focused news sites claim that the traffic was high enough to effectively create a “natural DDoS” attack on Shopify’s servers, causing the payment gateway to return errors on over 100,000 online stores. The problem was quickly resolved by Shopify’s tech staff.
Speaking to Cryptocoins News about the event, GAW Miners CEO Josh Garza said: “We use Shopify, the largest e-commerce system in the world. And we literally just brought it to its knees! … We knew the response was going to be big, but we didn’t know just how big it’d get.”
Garza added: “We’ve been politely asked to give advance warning next time.”
While the demand for a new product like Hashlet is understandable, from a mining perspective it’s not entirely clear if the pay-per-GH/s model GAW Miners has created is any more profitable than traditional mining systems, or offers significant advantages over lease-based mining.