When somebody is DDOSING with his botnet he will likely loose a lot of bots.
So i would think, its not a thread at all, maybe for a few days or weeks but a botnet operator would need to be sure to be compensated to move these resources.
Guess, there are hundreds of ways for a botnet owner to monetize.


As a pool operator its much more important to care about the server security and the latest 0days, for example the plesk 0day a month ago or so was really ugly.

Im not knowledgeable enough to give a concrete statement, but, if its hosted like silkroad for example the bots would probably need tor, so the botherder would need to install tor on them to be able to ddos as i understand it.
If thats correct the question should be is the tor network fast enough?
How much effort is it for a botherder to run tor on his bots?

So is bitpay still under attack and still down?

Beside bulletproof hosting, there are also services like cloudflare, isnt that an option?

BitPay is back. excellent work!

the site should be up now.  Lets see if the attacker can get through Cloudflare this time.

Seems like there is a demand for a "Protection Business" ... pay some regularly and you get security services for your site that may include things like unspecified counter-attacks against attackers and other black arts that could serve as deterrents against would-be threats.

Is this a serious proposal??

In real world this pattern is known as racketeering: put a shop on fire and then offer protection to the threatened owner. Do we really want Bitcoinland go that route?

CloudFlare is free (http://www.cloudflare.com/)

i doubt you can compete with that... 

No one should ever pay a DDOS ransom. Eventually you can quell the attack with multiple solutions. DDOS is unsustainable and is a US Felony.