Is DeepSeek still functional? When DeepSeek recovered from the highly anticipated DDOS attack across the network, we found Bitcoin in the DeepSeek interface request after resurrection.
On January 27th, the rapidly emerging Chinese AI model DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT for the first time in terms of download volume. Top the charts on the US App Store. Igniting special attention and coverage from the global technology, investment, and even media communities.
Behind this incident, it not only reminds people of the possibility of rewriting the future development pattern of science and technology between China and the United States. It also sent a brief wave of panic to the US capital market. As a result, Nvidia fell by 5.3%. ARM fell by 5.5%. Broadcom's decline reached 4.9%. TSMC's decline reached 4.5%. And Micron AMD、 Intel has experienced corresponding declines. Even Nasdaq 100 futures fell to -400 points. Expected to record the largest daily decline since December 18th. According to incomplete statistics, the market value of the US stock market is expected to evaporate over $1 trillion in Monday trading. Drop one-third of the total market value of the cryptocurrency market.
The cryptocurrency market, which closely follows the trend of the US stock market, has also experienced a sharp decline due to DeepSeek's manipulation. Among them, Bitcoin fell below $100500, with a 24-hour decline of 4.48%. ETH fell below $3200, with a 24-hour drop of 3.83%. Many people are still struggling to figure out why the cryptocurrency market has experienced a rapid decline? It may be related to lower expectations of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve or even other macroeconomic factors.
So where does market panic come from? DeepSeek did not develop through the accumulation of strong capital and massive graphics cards like OpenAi, Meta, or even Google. OpenAI was founded 10 years ago, has 4500 employees, and has raised $6.6 billion in funding to date. Meta spent $60 billion to develop an artificial intelligence data center almost the size of Manhattan. On the other hand, DeepSeek, founded less than 2 years ago, has 200 employees and a development cost of less than 10 million US dollars. We did not spend a huge amount of money piling up Nvidia's GPU graphics cards.
Some people cannot help but ask: how do they compete with DeepSeek? DeepSeek not only breaks the cost advantage at the capital/technology level, but also the traditional concepts and ideologies inherent in people before.
1： DeepSeek is stuck
DeepSeek is facing the largest scale DDOS attack. It is rumored that the peak traffic of the attack exceeded 3.2Tbps, which is equivalent to tens of millions of devices knocking on the door at the same time every second, causing the recently released R1 large model service to crash for nearly a day.
DeepSeek has made it through. Whose credit is it?
2： The Inspiration of Bitcoin
The essence of DDoS attacks is to flood the target system with a massive amount of invalid requests, until the target system becomes overwhelmed and refuses service.
Traditional defense methods such as traffic cleaning and IP blocking can alleviate symptoms, but they are difficult to cure at the root - the attack cost is low, the defense cost is high, just like "using fire hydrants to fight floods".
DeepSeek's new strategy, on the other hand, draws inspiration from Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. Simply put, if users want to call AI services, they need to first complete a calculation problem (similar to Bitcoin mining), and only those who successfully solve the problem can obtain a "pass". This design requires each request to incur a real computational cost, and if attackers want to launch large-scale attacks, the cost will increase exponentially.
What is the logic behind this?
Bitcoin ensures network security through PoW: miners consume computing power in exchange for accounting rights, and attackers who want to tamper with on chain data need to control more than 51% of the network's computing power, with costs far exceeding profits. DeepSeek has migrated this logic to the field of risk control - if attackers want to forge massive requests, they need to pay a computational cost equivalent to real users, which will be uneconomical for attackers.
This is too great.
3： The other side of the coin
DeepSeek's attempt reveals a trend: the underlying philosophy of blockchain is reshaping cybersecurity. The "economic game" thinking of PoW provides a new paradigm for combating distributed attacks - no longer relying solely on technological suppression, but through mechanism design to make attackers "voluntarily give up".
Just as Bitcoin uses decentralization to combat financial monopolies, DeepSeek uses computing power to compete against traffic surges. This may be the charm of technology: seemingly unrelated fields often hide the key to solving problems.
Ultimately, the essence of security is not to build walls, but to make the cost of destruction higher than the benefits. The cross-border collaboration between DeepSeek and Bitcoin may be the best annotation of this logic.
May you have both DeepSeek and Bitcoin.
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