It's not 360 that guards DeepSeek, but Bitcoin

Is DeepSeek still working? When DeepSeek recovered from the high-profile DDOS attack, we found BTC in the interface requests after resurrection.

Listen to me slowly.

First, the DeepSeek card has exploded

DeepSeek is experiencing the largest-scale DDOS attack.

It is rumored that the peak attack traffic exceeded 3.2Tbps, equivalent to tens of millions of devices "knocking on the door" every second, causing its newly released R1 large model service to be down for nearly 1 day.

DeepSeek has survived. Whose credit is it?

Some say that it is the senior Internet companies such as 360 Security Brain, Huawei Cloud's Taishan Prevention and Control, Alibaba Cloud's computing power scheduling algorithm, Hikvision's public monitoring algorithm, Netease's Fire game server cluster, Dingding's emergency communication pool, Cainiao's logistics scheduling algorithm, Red Hacker Alliance, etc., jointly conducting multi-level and multi-dimensional traffic filtering to protect the younger generation DeepSeek.

Please, don't believe in this kind of wishful thinking. Apart from Zhou Hongyi, who is tirelessly challenging DeepSeek, I think the other major companies are completely confused.

Behind this 'digital riot' is actually a microcosm of the network security battle - attackers control a 'zombie legion' to launch a tidal wave of requests, while defenders need to find a solution in the game of computing power and wisdom.

It's indeed a bit difficult.

But interestingly, the key to breaking the deadlock in DeepSeek lies not in the Shuangwen, but in Bitcoin.

2. Solid Evidence

At first, it was just curiosity. After the recovery, DeepSeek takes a long time to start spinning and the computer fan starts running at full speed. In terms of feeling, this is very similar to the well-known BTC mining.

It wasn't until I opened F12 and saw that DeepSeek's request had 'create_pow_challenge' that I realized DeepSeek was actually using Bitcoin's PoW system to fight against DDOS attacks.

Is it true? Let me ask my classmates at DeepSeek

It's true, not only used, but also used by OpenAI.

So, why BTC?

Three, Insights into Bitcoin

The essence of DDoS attack is to overwhelm the target system with a massive amount of invalid requests until the target system cannot bear it and refuses service.

Traditional defense measures such as traffic scrubbing and IP blocking, while able to alleviate symptoms, are difficult to cure fundamentally -- the cost of attack is low, the cost of defense is high, like "using a fire hydrant to fight a flood".

DeepSeek's new strategy borrows from Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism. Simply put, if users want to access AI services, they need to solve a computational problem (similar to BTC mining) and succeed in order to obtain a "pass". This design requires a real computational cost for each request, and the cost for attackers to launch large-scale attacks will increase exponentially.

What's the logic behind this?

BTC uses PoW to ensure network security: miners use computing power to obtain the right to record transactions. If an attacker wants to modify the data on the chain, they need to control more than 51% of the computing power of the entire network, which costs far more than the benefits. DeepSeek applies this logic to the risk control field - if an attacker wants to forge a massive number of requests, they need to pay the same computing power cost as the real users, which is uneconomical for attackers.

This is so great.

Four, the other side of the coin

DeepSeek's attempt reveals a trend: the underlying philosophy of blockchain is reshaping network security. The 'economic game' thinking of PoW provides a new paradigm for combating distributed attacks—not simply relying on technical suppression, but making attackers 'voluntarily give up' through mechanism design.

Just as Bitcoin uses decentralization to resist financial monopolies, DeepSeek uses computing power competition to resist the flood of traffic. This may be the charm of technology: seemingly unrelated fields often hide the key to solving problems.

In the end, the essence of security is not building walls, but making the cost of destruction higher than the benefits. And this "cross-border cooperation" between DeepSeek and BTC may be the best interpretation of this logic.

May you have both DeepSeek and BTC.