Due to the recent hurricane in the Northeastern part of the US, our hosting facility has lost power. They are working to resolve the situation and restart their backup generators however as of this moment do not have updates on when servers will be back online.

~Roman

[all]

The past few days have seen much speculation as to what is going on. I have waited to post updates until I had a clearer understanding of how to move forward.

After careful consideration, ACH withdrawals of USD from Bitfloor will soon be re-enabled, with details to be posted on bitfloor.com. You are welcome to continue keeping your USD funds at Bitfloor if you choose to do so. I feel that this is the first step in rebuilding the reputation of Bitfloor and regaining the trust of the community. As I have previously stated, all USD funds are available as no theft of USD occurred.

I have filed reports with the FBI and the IC3 regarding the theft. It was a cybercrime and as such am following up with the proper agencies to attempt to track down the perpetrator.

Finally, I am pursuing all avenues for keeping Bitfloor operational and serving the needs of the growing bitcoin community. I appreciate the support I have received from many over the past few days and will keep everyone updated as new information is available.

cheers,
~Roman

This thread is the sister thread to the "bitfloor needs your help" thread here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105818.0

It is meant for the tracking and discussion of the stolen coins from BitFloor.com

The attack came from the following IP:
178.176.218.157

And the coins were withdrawn with the following transactions:
83f3c30dc4fa25afe57b85651b9bbc372e8789d81b08d6966ea81f524e0a02be
d5d23a05858236c379d2aa30886b97600506933bc46c6f2aab2e05da85e61ad2
f9d55dc4b8af65e15f856496335a29e2be40f128a7374c75b75529e864579f93
42ea472060118ee5aee801cdedbc4a3403f3708a87340660f766e2669f0afeb0
358c873892016649ace8e9db4c59f98a6ca8165287ac80e80c52e621f5a26e46

Obviously it is high hopes to have the coins returned, but I do feel that the community can always benefit from more knowledge about high profile thefts and the aftermath.

As much as I regret the post I am about to write I feel that it is only fair and holding to the spirit of BitFloor that I disclose everything that is going on and make the information available. Please read the entirety of the post. As always, if you have any questions please post them here versus contacting support so that other users may benefit from the answer (unless it is private).

Last night, a few of our servers were compromised. As a result, the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys (the actual keys live in an encrypted area). Using these keys they were able to transfer the coins. This attack took the vast majority of the coins BitFloor was holding on hand. As a result, I have paused all exchange operations. Even tho only a small majority of the coins are ever in use at any time, I felt it inappropriate to continue operating not having the capability to cover all account balances for BTC at the time.

Due to the serious nature of what has happened I am currently evaluating options for BitFloor. One of the last things I want to happen is for BitFloor to shutdown and cause more panic in the bitcoin community. The platform itself is very valuable and provides an important and friendly service to many users.
BitFloor is very much focused on the end user and creating a reliable and trusted platform for everyone. Through exchange user support, I can continue to operate BitFloor. I believe that posting the exchange source and being even more transparent about operations would be a step in this direction if we were to continue operating. BitFloor is currently the #4 USD exchange and #1 in the US.

As a last resort, I will be forced to fully shut BitFloor down and initiate account repayment using current available funds. I still have all of the logs for accounts, trades, transfers. I know exactly how much each user currently has in their account for both USD and BTC. No records were lost in this attack.

I realize that saying that I appreciate everyone's understanding is a moot point, however I do wish to re-iterate that my goal is to find the best and most reasonable way forward for BitFloor customers and the exchange and not create more panic that the community has already seen time and time again.

I would like to keep this thread focused on evaluating ideas of BitFloor operation and will create a separate thread for discussion (see below) about the actual transactions and tracing the coin theft. I will not speak at detail about the actual breach at this time as my current focus is on the future and not the past.

In the intrest of information for tracking stolen coins:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105819.0

~Roman

I wanted to do a quick writeup on the Bitfloor outage that occurred on August 31st 2012 for those interested.

Our hosting provider experienced a power outage in one of their facilities. The facility happened to be the one where we have some of our primary boxes and thus were were affected by the power outage. The website and other auxiliary services were offline as a result. As soon as the power was restored and our boxes brought back online I began restoring the various services (website, order gateways, matching engine, etc). Once those were restored, I restored the bitcoin services and wallet (this takes longer and is more manual due to the security in place for the wallet and private keys).

In the end it was nothing more than a power outage that caused the disruption. I can re-assure everyone that all financials (USD and BTC are in order) and as of now all exchange operations are back online.

Going forward I will be looking at using multiple data center locations and/or a separate status page to indicate the current situation and not keep you (our users) in the dark about what is going on. Our goal is to be as fault tolerant with our systems as possible and I will be evaluating how to make that happen as we continue to grow.

go sell!

I am going to be hanging out in London for a bit (starting now). Anyone know of any Bitcoin meetups in/around central London? Or possibly we could organize one just to gather and chat about Bitcoins some

I know the conference is coming up (if that is still happening) but figured locals could meet before that.

Lots of BTC for sale on bitfloor for under 9$ and some at 9$.

With the recent rise of the price of Bitcoins I wanted to talk about a few factors that I think are helping contribute to this.

1) Lack of short selling
2) No liquidity rebates on many major exchanges.

The first one means that anyone who wishes to get into bitcoins or trade on the markets is going to be bullish from the start. Anyone who buys in at any price using fiat (i.e. USD) will need the price to go up to make money (on non liquidity rebate exchanges) and anyone who is a miner or has many coins will want the price to go up so will not have real incentive to keep the price steady or push it down. As such I do not believe these markets represent the real price of bitcoins.

Now, everyone else who just wants to use Bitcoins will have a harder time as a result of these two conditions. Merchants will have a hard time keeping up with the currency exchange risk and buyers will be constantly thinking they could have gotten a better price here or there.. etc.

I say the above because I want to bring light to how I believe a liquidity rebate (like the one offered by Bitfloor) help those trying to provide a market keep the price stable. Let say I am a market maker and I put an order out to buy bitcoins (and the exchange has no rebate). My order executes and I am charged a fee. This means that if I want to sell those same bitcoins I am already pushing the price up. However, if I am given a rebate for the order, I could turn around and sell the bitcoins at the same price or just 0.01$ higher and again look to get a rebate. By being constantly on the inside of the book with very large orders, I can pin the price better and still make a profit. This means that I can market make without the price having to move at all. In my opinion this is an important aspect of the liquidity rebate that helps price stabilize when short selling is not available.

Obviously there are other nuances here, but I just wanted to throw this example out there for people who do some trading to try out and think about. It may be great to see the price of bitcoin rise rise rise for some, but for others it makes their transactions harder to manage so stable markets have their benefit as well

I have tried looking around for some docs/notes on how the 'move' rpc call works on a more technical level. From my understanding I have gathered the following (please correct any and all of the things I have listed and I might throw them up on the wiki).

* A move does not create a tx on the network
* A move is really just an internal accounting ledger
* If I receive into A, move all coins into B, and then send from A, the coins will really be sent from B (since the move is just internal).

Maybe I have missed something very fundamental about how the move command works but that is how I understand it to operate given what I have been able to find.

We have free cash deposits at Chase bank branches!

For those struggling with MtGox Dwolla withdraws and have concerns, I would suggest checking out our ACH withdraw option. We do direct deposit into your US bank account without going through a third party money transmitting service like Dwolla. We dispatch payments directly from our US bank accounts ensuring that your funds only go between your Bitfloor account and your bank account.

Questions and comments are always welcome. Anyone currently using the service is free to leave feedback and testimonials about their experience

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/future-of-money

Large standing order for anyone interested.

Bitfloor now has an API for getting historical market data:
https://bitfloor.com/docs/api/market-data/rest#trades

You can request from a particular sequence number (see the websocket API for what these are) or a timestamp.

If you want realtime data, see the websocket api:
https://bitfloor.com/docs/api/market-data/websocket

Bitfloor is pleased to begin offering cash deposits to fund your Bitfloor account. We are also offering ACH (direct deposit) withdraw options to customers who wish to withdraw money directly to US bank accounts without going through a 3rd party.

ACH withdraw and cash deposits are FREE!
https://bitfloor.com/docs

please contact support@bitfloor.com for more details or to setup any of these transfer methods.

International customers can request wire deposits and withdraw for USD. The fees will depend on your origin or destination bank.

edit: changed url for documentation

Bitfloor now has a new API for withdrawing to MtGox Redeem Codes:
https://bitfloor.com/docs/api/rest#withdraw

This means that you can now withdraw and deposit MtGox Redeem Codes using the REST API.

MtGox Redeem Code withdraw and deposits support both USD and BTC.

You can now use our new 'deposit' API for processing your MtGox Codes.
https://bitfloor.com/docs/api/rest#deposit

This will allow certain types of arb trading to happen faster and hopefully lead to better prices on Bitfloor.

We will be adding the other side (withdraw to MtGox) soon.

Bitfloor users can now deposit funds and start trading instantly using MtGox redeemable codes!

You can redeem a code on your "deposit funds" page and the funds will be reflected on your user overview. Please let support know if you experience any issues and they will be resolved.

We are looking at adding MtGox codes as a withdraw option as well to make it event easier to move funds between the two exchanges!

For anyone looking to write automated traders using javascript with node.js, I maintain a library which should simply the task of connecting to the various exchanges, entering orders, and capturing market data.

https://github.com/bitfloor/trader.nodejs

The library is in the very early phases and the APIs are still under development but the README should point you in the right direction. Feel free to file github issues for features you would like to see and any problems you encounter.

There is also a command line order entry utility (currently for bitfloor only, but it will work for mtgox soon). The command line utility allows basic order entry commands without needing a web interface. The idea is for it to aid in testing when you are developing your trading bot.

Writing traders with javascript and node.js is easy and fun! Give it a try.