Bitcoin Forum

Hi all, I'll be keeping track of bitoption up and down notices here.

Back up from our DDOS attack. Hopefully that's it for now.

Update: We're up, and (I think, looking good).

Are you short bitcoin? You can come take 2 BTC off me by buying me July 28 Calls. They'll expire out of the money if BTC are under $20 US per.

https://bitoption.org

I'll be taking the market down for 20 minutes or so shortly to switch over the default system to price USD-BTC, not reverse.

Update, all this comes from wanting to denominate prices in BTC.

Flipping calls / puts is fine, but consider, how will they be denominated? If in BTC, then 1 unit = 1 BTC, what people are imagining. But, you can't then PAY in BTC for the puts/calls because you have weirdly non-linear payout streams.

The right thing to do is charge in USD for these options. It's going to take a little more time than 20 minutes, though. Sorry. We have a few outstanding options; you'll be contacted to see what you'd like to do with them.

Market is up. It now works like everyone thought it should the whole time. Enjoy!

Getting this for balance: {"obligations": {"msg": "Obligations includes all written unexercised contracts", "usd": "0", "btc": "0"}, "balances": [["BTC", "0.000000"], ["USD", "0.000000"]]}

after 8 confirms.

edit: showed up, is it really that many confirms required?

my call disappeared but in my balancethe money is missing,
i've [["BTC", "0.717200 
i bought 1 call for 0.28 (strike 20 for 28 july) that now doesnt show up under my contracts
what happened?

Enky,

It should still be in the system; I didn't wipe any purchases contracts. PM me with your login info or mail met at admin@bitoption.com; I can't match your name here to any logins on the exchange.

Also, we can review your entire balance together since every transaction is logged, and make sure you've got everything.

How to cancel an offer?

Right now, API, or PM me. In the next 12 hours, there should be a web interface.

Oh, okay. It's not a big deal. I don't mind the offer I made, just wanted to make a different one and solved that problem by depositing more.

Canceling and Exercising is up and running; login and click "My Contracts."

(Did I really sell $45 july 28 calls a couple days ago? Wow!)

Exchanging to USD seems to fail without giving any message.

Works now, I figured out that MtGox was down, that's all. Still it should mention the failure. I didn't know if it was no go or slow go or what.

Thanks for the update. Yes, we rely on Gox, and should have better error messages there. Sorry if it was an untimely difficulty. Kind of a crazy trading day today!

Hello, I sent in 2 btc, and they haven't shown up yet even though there are 8 conformation. I'm not really that worried, but I wanted to report a bug. When I click "balance" I just get a box that says

{"obligations": {"msg": "Obligations includes all written unexercised contracts", "usd": "0", "btc": "0"}, "balances": [["BTC", "0.000000"], ["USD", "0.000000"]]}

I was also wondering, when I exercise a call, do I have to have the USD to buy in my balance or do I get a chance to immediately liquidate the BTC and pay out of that?

EDIT: The bitcoins showed up, thanks. But I could still use an answer about liquidation.

Hi Damien,

Welcome!

You need the right currency to exercise, but you could rinse/repeat/cycle if you only have enough to do one at a time; so, exercise one, sell BTC, exercise one (or two), repeat.

We may eventually allow netting, but I need to make sure that the exchange doesn't take on exchange risk doing that.

Enjoy, and happy trading!

Ok thanks. I'll keep that in mind as I trade.

Our Site is down while Gox gets back on its feet post-DDOS.

Normally we can function in 'reduced functionality' mode, but the error checking isn't quite good enough to catch the current circumstance.

Updates here as it comes.

Back up.

For discussion, I repost our top of thread status here:


Update:

There is an attempt at a CSRF in the wild right now aimed at bitoption.org. It tries to send 20 BTC to an address starting with: 1GEwYPX6..

I reviewed our balance sheets and transaction log; nobody has been hit by this or any other CSRF to my knowledge; I manually reviewed back four days of transaction, and scanned the rest for repeated withdrawal requests to confirm.

That said, someone has clearly posted an image link, likely in these forums, which directs to sendBTC?etc.etc. This image link will not function, and has not been successful against bitoption.

The site is down right this second, I am putting in a few layers of protection against this, and will update when it's in place.

In the interim, if you would like to exercise your contracts, please email me at admin@bitoption.com FROM your account email, and I'll manually fill your requests, including withdrawals if you need.

I anticipate a few hours to get this sorted out; there will be a slight impact on API developers as well.

Sorry, this is my bad; I thought about XSS but not CSRF when I implemented the API. My hope is that the damage is limited to a little downtime for you all. More here and in the status thread as it comes!

The site is down for me right now, getting a server timeout.

Yep. We went down 10 minutes ago; I just got notified.

There is some sort of problem with our hosting provider; I've filed a critical level ticket, updates here shortly.

Update: there's a DDOS attack against our provider and node. Could be due to us, could be something else. More as I get it.

Aww, that sucks. I bet you're the target, I hope it gets solved easily.

We're back up; our provider seems to have things under control; no notification though. I'm probably on the hunt for better hosting. We'll see.

Makes it hard to trade, all this security / DDOS-ing type stuff! Bad for business.. :)

it won't allow me to register...

"there was some sort of problem. Try again."

sadface.

Hunter, we're back up now; Our register function wasn't smart enough to get past the anti-CSRF stuff we put in.

Sorry about that! Try again.

ah there we go, working now

The expired options aren't gone again.

THe expired option are now correctly gone from the "my contracts" section, but my funds are still in escrow. I have an extra 4 BTC and $10 being held in escrow compared to what I should, all from freshly expired options.

Was just about to say the same thing Damien.

My guess is he perhaps wants to wait until Mt. Gox come back online, although being able to trade options now would be a good hedge against what price btc will be at when Mt. Gox comes back online.

bitoption i wrote you twice asking a fix, i bought a call strike 20$ exp.date 28 july 2011 and not a PUT, but now i've a put under my contracts instead of the call, could you please have a look? thanks:)

Everything is fixed for me, thanks.

bitoption admin, i wrote you an email asking to exercise my option, i tried to click on exercise button but nothing happens, i'm already disappointed that due to an your problem i've now a put instead of a call, at least try to answer me in a timingly manner.
Thank You

I'm getting a "502 Bad Gateway" error.

So was I, but now I'm getting a "504 Gateway Time Out" error.

Yep, and the market is doing some really interesting stuff right now. I'd like to get it sooner rather than later.

Now it's unresponsive. I'm logged in, but I can't see my balance or contracts. Previously, I could log out and back in again to get it to work. Now it won't even log out. The browser seems to sit there doing nothing.

Come on BitOption, where are you? I can understand having problems as a result of the Mt. Gox fiasco and API changes, but you're leaving us all in the dark as our contracts tick down. You risk losing our trust and market share if you don't at least provide us with an update! BitOption is still in a fragile infantile stage of development. It's a critical time for you to show your commitment to this project.

The level of service is unacceptable >:(, thanks to god i tried it with only 1 btc.
i'm still waiting from him an answer after 7 days, all i ask is to have my 1 btc back:)

Hi Enky,

Actually you asked for a refund on an option you purchased before we swapped over. I offered to buy it from you at the greater of the price you paid or the intrinsic value.

That's a little different.

My quick update is that we're rewriting the Exchange API to deal with numerous changes made at Mt. Gox; Gox had gone dark on us for a while, but I think we're close to having feature parity from before the crash, based on some API additions Mark made last night.

Sorry for being out of touch; my life got crazy. As penance, I've hired a support person and programmer, Bitoption Support on the forums. He'll be in and commenting and helping out M-F at the least.

@bitoption

Glad to see this is still moving forward, I was starting to think this was a lost cause. Please prove me wrong soon.

In the meantime, I cannot withdraw my bitcoins, which as I'm sure you can imagine is very worrisome to me.

What should I do?

No, you offered a refund, i never asked for it, i always asked to have my original call option back:)
when you offered a refund, i said yes, let's talk about it, i dont want to have a loss due to that problem etc..... but you answered saying that you were going to refund me the initial price of the option but i never received the money and i was a bit annoyed, that's all.
aniway i received the refund, thanks, it's ok, i hope the best for you and your service.
Cya

Hi,

I would like to withdraw my funds because I don't think there's any progress being made on the bitoption site lately...

How can I withdraw dollars?
(I can't exchange those for BTC, because that's not working...)

When I withdraw BTC it says: "transfer of **** btc failed. Sorry! We logged the incident and will respond soon."

How can i withdraw my dollars and BTC?

Regards,

Frans.

Hi all,

Here's an update: I have reworked most of the system, including how we hold bitcoin, and how we deal with withdrawals. Please read the following information:

NOT WORKING STILL

• Purchasing And Selling Contracts
• The Bitoption BTC Page
• Auto-exercise of contracts
• The Trading API

Working

• Transfers from here to Mt. Gox
• Transfers back from Mt. Gox
• Withdraw and Deposit
• Detailed history of all transactions
• The Contracts Tab

Change in Functionality: We have moved to a multi-exchange system; this means we can hold your Bitcoin for you if you prefer not to have it in Mt. Gox. Transfers between exchanges are relatively speedy. Due to how Mt. Gox works (and also what we feel are best practices) we only send and receive BTC through our own wallet now; this means you will need to have BTO-BTC to withdraw.
Ryan and I are still working feverishly, the market making bot is ready to go, and needs a few hooks written on the exchange side. I worked 22 hours yesterday, and roughly 60 hours in the last 4 days; we are very close to a much improved exchange. Thanks for your patience.

Questions: please e-mail ryan@bitoption.com or admin@bitoption.com.

Bitoption Admin

Thank you for your PM and all the hard work you've done!
I'm glad to see there's still a lot going on.

I'll keep my funds @bitoption... :)

I see the site has changed and now says it is undergoing "finalized support for market makers".
 - https://bitoption.org

I would be very interested but the site has not worked for me once yet. Is the site down or something? Or is it just me...

site is down for me too.

The site has been down since the Mt Gox hack. When was that? About a year ago? I do miss it. I'm still waiting for a good alternative.

The most liquid alternative:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MPEx

Potential, but no trading on it yet:
 - http://www.BitcoinOPX.com

Then there is icbit.se futures:
 - http;//www.icbit.se

As always, there are various risks with these.