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MtGox source code released

M

Mark R

Diamond Member
A bunch of Russian hackers claim to have "liberated" the MtGox exchange platform code.

This billion-dollar currency exchange appears to have been written in PHP, and demonstrates the sophisticated object-oriented approach of the language by lumping the entire framework into a single class, including transaction generation, wallet and blockchain management, database management, web page rendering, dynamic JSON and XML rendering, and inline dynamic SQL.

The programmers clearly demonstrate their skill by managing thousand line procedures, multi-hundred line switch statements. An impressive feat indeed, as the extensive blocks of commented out code, suggest that there was no source control system for testing.

Link
 
Just from that description, it sounds exactly like how I would code it. Which is exactly why it should never be trusted 😀


(okay, I would have done different classes, and wouldn't have used PHP, but the mass blocks of commented code and general terribad practices are right up my alley)
 
Heh... I heard that they didn't even have a development or QA server at Mt. Gox. They just posted updates directly to the live server 🙂

That might work for Magic The Gathering trading card site, but not for a site that deals with hard currency!
 
I just started my own Exchange, and that's exactly how I'm doing it, but in javascript.
 
ultimatebob said:
Heh... I heard that they didn't even have a development or QA server at Mt. Gox. They just posted updates directly to the live server 🙂

That might work for Magic The Gathering trading card site, but not for a site that deals with hard currency!
Click to expand...

obligatory:

NnEuRnH.png
 
Yeah, it's been known for quite some time that their code and development environment was utter shit.

Developers had gone in for interviews and proceeded to run for the hills after learning they had no testing or QA environment at all.

For a long time it was very easy to manipulate Mt. Gox simply by flooding their API with requests causing their trading engine to lag severely and people/bots would start to panic.
 
ultimatebob said:
By hard currency, I meant that US dollars they were holding for users, so they could buy Bitcoin with them.
Click to expand...

That's fair. What I don't understand is why you would leave either USD or BTC on an exchange for longer than it took to process a transfer.

Were people day-trading BTC to and from USD?
 
It sounds like they got too big too fast. They needed a dev team and some financial guys to do sanity checks on the overall business. Instead they had some guys from his guild who know PHP.

ultimatebob said:
Heh... I heard that they didn't even have a development or QA server at Mt. Gox. They just posted updates directly to the live server 🙂

That might work for Magic The Gathering trading card site, but not for a site that deals with hard currency!
Click to expand...

D:
 
jagec said:
That's fair. What I don't understand is why you would leave either USD or BTC on an exchange for longer than it took to process a transfer.

Were people day-trading BTC to and from USD?
Click to expand...

I think some people viewed the exchanges as Bitcoin banks.
 
jagec said:
That's fair. What I don't understand is why you would leave either USD or BTC on an exchange for longer than it took to process a transfer.

Were people day-trading BTC to and from USD?
Click to expand...

What happened to a lot of people is that they put cash into the exchange, bought Bitcoin with it, sold it for a tidy profit, and then found that they had no way to get the cash out of the exchange. A lot of sites like Paypal refused to do business with Mt. Gox because of fraud claims, while others made the users jump through a lot of loopholes like faxing paperwork to them to confirm their identity.
 
I don't mean to disparage PHP as a language/platform, but I've been seeing this kind of crap from ex PHP'ers for over a decade.

"Here's my uberapp... it's an 80k line static function."
 
I can't even read code and it looks sloppy. :/
I think it's good for the cryptocurrency community that that are gone.
 
Hmmm... MtGOX was just an outlier anyway. Good riddance.


/say those who maybe don't fully realize MtGOX was the biggest exchange for bitcoin

There are some people in huge denial about the status of cryptocurrencies right now.
 
Rakehellion said:
Which 100% defeats the purpose of using object-oriented programming.

But that describes PHP/Java programmers in general.
Click to expand...

I agree that describes PHP programmers, but not Java. Java programmers tend to just write overly verbose code and get happy when they write neatly formatted boilerplate code. I hate the Java "philosophy," if you will. It's like a modern day COBOL.
 
So in other words, it was a typical php application. 😛

I coded an entire forum system once in php, I did not know anything about OOP then, not a single class was used. It worked, but man that code was awful. I moved on to other projects and never finished it, but it had mostly all the featured you'd expect a forum to have. I used it for my college TR and actually got an A.
 
Red Squirrel said:
So in other words, it was a typical php application. 😛

I coded an entire forum system once in php, I did not know anything about OOP then, not a single class was used. It worked, but man that code was awful. I moved on to other projects and never finished it, but it had mostly all the featured you'd expect a forum to have. I used it for my college TR and actually got an A.
Click to expand...

To be fair, these shenanigans are possible regardless of language, but for whatever reason, PHP seems to house/attract those who are most prone to doing it (such weekend warriors who think of themselves as 'hax0rz' but are actually totally clueless when it comes to proper app design).
 
Having tried to use PHP (including 5), I've come to the conclusions that much like with python, people that don't know what the fuck they're doing invariably end up doing it in php/python.

The whole resource management system (require/autoload) is a total disaster and doesn't actually support 100% of the language (autoloading interfaces doesn't really work). It wants to be grown up oo language, but it really is qbasic embedded in html.
 
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