Avoid flexcoin!

[dooferorg]

Having tried using flexcoin, I have to say, STAY AWAY!

I had a small balance from mining activities that I started depositing to flexcoin. I decided I wanted to move that to an account under CryptoXChange.

When I tried to do the transfer, it didn't take the fees out automatically. Strange, I thought. I checked the fees and deducted it from the amount I was trying to send. Still says not enough coins. I commented on this to the customer service and they proceeded to treat me like an idiot saying I couldn't do 'simplistic math', stating that I *obviously* needed to work out the fee differently.

Only when I tried with an amount that would leave me with a balance of 0.00000001 in my flexcoin wallet did the transfer succeed.

So, beware. Your coins may be stuck there and flexcoin are immature jerks who will not help you.

[gbl08ma]

I sent the very little coins I had there to somewhere else a long time ago (before they changed owners), and now that I think on it, I think I had a similar problem... because of the fees math, I had to leave a little amount in there, not that it matters anymore.

IMHO you should stay away from Flexcoin [not only because of the reasons mentioned in the OP but also] because the fees to take money out of the account and into other Bitcoin addresses are really noncompetitive compared to other online wallets. That wouldn't be an issue if enough people used Flexcoin (transfers between accounts are free), but I don't think its userbase is significant enough, so you'll find yourself transferring to outside Bitcoin addresses more often than to Flexcoin accounts.

[Fiyasko]

Why people use AltCoins is beyond me

And "online banks" are just a rediculosly unsecure thing for someone to do with thier money

[gbl08ma]

You know, Flexcoin is not an altcoin. It's a "Bitcoin bank" (their words, not mine).
I'll leave the link here so you can see how it is not an altcoin... http://www.flexcoin.com/

[Stephen Gornick]

Only when I tried with an amount that would leave me with a balance of 0.00000001 in my flexcoin wallet did the transfer succeed.

This a problem that most exchanges have with regard to fees on trades and what EWallets have when they charge fees on withdrawals/spending.  The problem is that "math is hard".

The UI for most of these do nothing to make it so that user isn't forced to know basic math in order to spend the remaining balance.

I've never used FlexCoin so I don't know how they handle their transactions, but here's a typical scenario:

If the fee is 1% and I have 0.80000012 BTC, then the calculation for the fee is 0.008000001.  But that is sub-satoshi, so it rounds up and treats the fee as 0.00800001, leaving  0.79200011 as the amount that can be withdrawn.

But my own calculation after manually subtracting the fee I come up with 0.792000119 BTC of funds.   If I try to enter that amount, the system knows that 0.792000119 is a number greater than 0.79200011 and thus I am trying to withdraw more than my available balance.

If the service were to allow that to occur, what would happen is bots would be written to take advantage of this, earning 1 satoshi at a time, millions of times.

Something like this rounding-related issue  is likely what is happening here.

There are a number of methods of addressing this.  For instance, whenever attempting to withdraw more than your balance, the service could calculate and display the maximum amount after fees that you can withdraw.  You click OK and the transaction completes.  Problem solved.